The Guardian

‘Urgent’ coordinated action to tackle overconsumption, farming subsidies and the climate crisis also needed to halt biodiversity loss

Expanding national parks and protected areas will not be enough to halt the destruction of nature, warn leading scientists, who say urgent action on overconsumption, harmful subsidies and the climate crisis is also required to halt biodiversity loss.

Governments are expected to commit to a Paris-style agreement for nature at Cop15 in Kunming, China, later this year, with targets that include protecting at least 30% of the oceans and land by 2030.

One Scottish trawlerman is so incensed by the dumping of nets he’s come to me – a longstanding critic of his industry – with evidence

How could they be so careless? How do fishing vessels lose so many of their nets and longlines that this “ghost gear”, drifting through the oceans, now presents a mortal threat to whales, dolphins, turtles and much of the rest of the life of the sea? After all, fishing gear is expensive. It is either firmly attached to the vessel or, using modern technologies, easily located.

I’ve asked myself these questions for a while, and I think I now have an answer. It comes from an unlikely source: a trawlerman working in Scotland. I’m not a fan of trawling, but I recognise that some operations are more damaging than others. He and his colleagues now appear to be pulling in more nets than fish. On trip after trip they catch vast hauls of ghost gillnets and longlines, often wrapped around marine animals. He has sent me his photos, which are so disturbing I can scarcely bear to look: drowned seabirds, decapitated seals and fish and crustaceans of many species, which died a long, slow death. Where are these nets and lines coming from? He believes they’re being deliberately discarded.

I have checked his identity, but he wants to remain anonymous. Like other local trawlers, his boat brings its waste to land. The problem, he says, lies with large vessels, many from France and Spain, that spend four to six weeks at a time at sea. They don’t have enough storage space for the rubbish they generate: most of the hold is dedicated to frozen fish. Worn-out gillnets and longlines should be returned to port for disposal. But those he retrieves have a revealing characteristic: the expensive parts, those that can be reused – floats, weights and hooks – have been cut off. This, he believes, is a giveaway: if you find a net or line like that, it has been deliberately thrown overboard.

George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

If the water industry is to improve its dismal performance, regulators need to be open with the public

English water companies have got used to pumping raw sewage into the sea and rivers. An investigation launched last year by the regulator, Ofwat, and the Environment Agency, is a chance to put things right. But there are worrying signs that this opportunity to shine a light is in danger of being missed. The refusal by the Environment Agency to reveal which 2,000 sewage treatment works in England are being looked at, and whether this will lead to delays in dealing with new complaints, raises questions about its commitment to openness.

That the investigation is happening at all is due to huge efforts by campaigners. Concern over sewage dumps has been rising in response to water companies’ failure to tackle a longstanding problem that increased extreme weather, due to climate change, is expected to make worse. Discharges of untreated waste into the sea or rivers are supposed to happen only in exceptional circumstances, to reduce flood risk. Over recent years, it has become clear that rules are being routinely flouted by an industry that puts profits before environmental stewardship. At the same time, the Environment Agency’s record for punishing breaches has sharply declined following budget cuts. A report from a committee of MPs last week drew attention to the poor condition of rivers and called for a step change.

Ahead of Penguin Awareness Day, the Wildlife Conservation Society released a selfie video of a penguin feeding underwater.

The footage showed a male Gentoo penguin diving and twisting through schools of sardines.

Fitted with a special camera, the penguin can be seen feeding on sardines in the Beagle Channel off Isla Martillo, in Tierra del Fuego, Argentina.

Penguin Awareness Day is on 20 January

Priti Patel’s crackdown on peaceful protesters ignores all the evidence about how to handle large demonstrations

On the first day of 2022 – the hottest New Year’s Day on record – Priti Patel announced that cracking down on eco protesters would be one of her priorities for the year.

It wasn’t simply rhetoric. The police, crime, sentencing and courts bill for England and Wales being debated in parliament provides the police with a dramatic extension to their powers to stop or constrain protest. It even contains a provision allowing police to fine protesters for inadvertent breaches of restrictions they “ought” to have known about.

Stephen Reicher is a member of the Sage subcommittee advising on behavioural science. He is a professor of Psychology at the University of St Andrews. During Cop26 he was part of a research team, funded by the New Institute in Hamburg, which was studying the dynamics of protest.

Special bricks could attract mites or encourage spread of disease if not cleaned properly, say some experts

An initiative in Brighton aimed at helping protect the bee population could do more harm than good, scientists have warned.

The council in Brighton has passed a planning condition that means any new building more than five metres high will have to include swift boxes and special bricks with holes known as bee bricks. They will provide nesting and hibernating space for solitary bees.

There are about 270 species of bee in Britain, just under 250 of which are solitary bees that live alone, although often nest close to one another.

Solitary bees in Britain are highly diverse, and so are their nesting habits. Most British species nest in the ground, excavating their own nest.

The honeybee is probably the best-known bee. They live socially and are led by a queen and serviced by male drones and female worker bees.

The bee population is thought to have declined in the UK since the 1970s. For example, the number of managed honeybee hives in England dropped by 50% between 1985 and 2005, and 67% of common widespread moth species have declined since the 1970s.

Since 1900, the UK has lost 13 species of bee, and a further 35 are considered under threat of extinction.

The decline in population is thought to be because of changes in land use, which has led to habitat loss. Other issues affecting bees include disease, pesticides, pollution and climate change.

One of the best ways of helping bees is thought to be by planting flowers rich in nectar.

Investment fund manager says firms that do not plan for a carbon-free future risk being left behind

Larry Fink, the chief executive of BlackRock, the world’s biggest investment fund manager, said pushing climate policies was about profits, not being “woke”.

In his annual letter to CEOs , Fink said businesses, cities and countries that do not plan for a carbon-free future risked being left behind. He argued that the pursuit of long-term returns was the main driver behind climate policies, after being criticised for seeking to influence companies.

America’s largest oil firm claims its history of publicly denying the climate crisis is protected by the first amendment

ExxonMobil is attempting to use an unusual Texas law to target and intimidate its critics, claiming that lawsuits against the company over its long history of downplaying and denying the climate crisis violate the US constitution’s guarantees of free speech.

The US’s largest oil firm is asking the Texas supreme court to allow it to use the law, known as rule 202, to pursue legal action against more than a dozen California municipal officials. Exxon claims that in filing lawsuits against the company over its role in the climate crisis, the officials are orchestrating a conspiracy against the firm’s first amendment rights.

Study calls for cap on production and release as pollution threatens global ecosystems upon which life depends

The cocktail of chemical pollution that pervades the planet now threatens the stability of global ecosystems upon which humanity depends, scientists have said.

Plastics are of particularly high concern, they said, along with 350,000 synthetic chemicals including pesticides, industrial compounds and antibiotics. Plastic pollution is now found from the summit of Mount Everest to the deepest oceans, and some toxic chemicals, such as PCBs, are long-lasting and widespread.

Assessment contains inadequate surveys of threatened species habitat and fails to identify that project could cause flooding of 284km of waterways, officials say

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The Perrottet government will have to rework large parts of the environmental impact statement for its proposal to raise the Warragamba dam wall, according to officials responsible for assessing the project.

NSW environment officials have told the government its analysis, published in September, has failed to properly assess or justify impacts to the Greater Blue Mountains world heritage area that would be caused by the $1.6bn plan to raise the wall by up to 17 metres.

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Global heating of 2C would cause billions in damage each year by 2050, according to risk assessment

The climate crisis will wipe at least 1% a year off the UK’s economy by 2045 if global temperatures are allowed to rise by 2C, the government has said.

More action would be needed on key areas such as flood defences, restoring natural protections such as peatlands and wetlands, and making the built environment more resilient to extreme weather, ministers said.

Whales still face many threats, mostly from us, so let us savour this rare congregation of them in the Antarctic Peninsula

Good news doesn’t get any more in-your-face than this. One thousand fin whales, one of the world’s biggest animals, were seen last week swimming in the same seas in which they were driven to near-extinction last century due to whaling. It’s like humans never happened.

This vast assembly was spread over a five-mile-wide area between the South Orkney islands and the Antarctic Peninsula. A single whale is stupendous; imagine 1,000 of them, their misty forest of spouts, as tall as pine trees, the plosive sound of their blows, their hot breath condensing in the icy air. Their sharp dorsal fins and steel-grey bodies slide through the waves like a whale ballet, choreographed at the extreme south of our planet.

In blow to climate campaigners, state encourages miners to ramp up output to avert winter gas crisis

China’s coal production reached record levels last year as the state encouraged miners to ramp up their fossil fuel output to safeguard the country’s energy supplies through the winter gas crisis.

The world’s biggest coal producer and consumer mined 384.67m tonnes of the fossil fuel last month, easily topping its previous record of 370.84m tonnes set in November, after the government called for miners to work at maximum capacity to help fuel the country’s economic growth.

Fish Legal calls for Environment Agency to reveal details on 2,000 sites under investigation

A campaign group is challenging what it says is an information blackout imposed by the Environment Agency on its investigation into suspected illegal sewage dumping in England.

The inquiry began after water companies admitted to the agency they may have been illegally discharging raw sewage from treatment works into rivers and streams.

England’s water is bad and getting worse, with regulators too poor or politically cowed to do anything about it

Last year the Environment Agency received more than 100,000 reports of water, air and land pollution in England. The public told of rivers flowing with human faeces, chemicals dumped, fish killed, factories emitting dangerous fumes, nature reserves and the countryside trashed, as well as unbearable noise and dirty air.

Nearly all these reports were ignored and now we know why. According to shocking leaked documents, the agency, which is the statutory protector of England’s natural environment and therefore of much of its health and safety, had ordered its staff to ignore all but the most obvious, high-profile incidents. Its staff were sent to observe only 8,000 of the 116,000 potential pollution incidents and only a handful of companies were taken to court.

Animal lacking dorsal fin last seen in Antarctic labouring to swim and considered unlikely to survive

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A juvenile humpback whale has been spotted in the Antarctic entangled in fishing gear, leading to calls from conservationists for better protections along migration corridors.

The sighting last Wednesday by scientists aboard the Crystal Endeavour occurred at Mikkelsen Harbour on Trinity Island, on the western side of the Antarctic peninsula.

Tracking a wild cougar and swapping its collar battery is all in a day’s work for the Olympic Cougar Project, a partnership between a coalition of Native American tribes, a renowned cougar expert and the Washington Department of Transportation

Independent tests find that a number of products on the market use oxidised oils, with the rancidity often masked by flavourings

More than one in 10 fish oil supplements tested from among 60 large retail brands are rancid, while nearly half are just under the recommended maximum limit, according to independent tests.

Conducted over several years by Labdoor, which analyses vitamins and supplements based on criteria such as purity, label accuracy and nutritional value, the tests measured common US-branded fish oils, available globally, against international voluntary standards of rancidity.

Crown Estate Scotland hopes amount of electricity generated in Scottish waters will double over next decade

Scotland’s largest-ever auction of permits to construct offshore windfarms is expected to raise up to £860m when the results are announced on Monday.

Crown Estate Scotland, which is running the auction, hopes that windfarms with as much as 10 gigawatts of new generating capacity will be built over the next decade, effectively doubling the amount of electricity generated in Scottish waters in a transition which has the potential to create tens of thousands of jobs.

Britain faces years of high energy prices and needs to have a conversation about what policies are needed

The good news is that energy prices will be coming down. The bad news is nobody knows when for sure. The UK’s biggest energy supplier, Centrica, says high gas and electricity prices could last for another two years. The International Energy Agency (IEA) reckons that’s too optimistic. Expensive bills are a problem for firms, consumers and the government. Households could face a doubling of annual energy bills to £2,400 a year from October - a cost-of-living catastrophe for millions. While Labour proposes a support package, Conservative ministers have said little – fuelling suspicions that they intend to reduce demand for energy by making people poorer.

Carbon-based energy will fade, but it won’t disappear completely. To keep temperatures to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, the IEA says the world in 2050 would have to use about half as much natural gas as today and about one-quarter as much oil. British policymakers must wake up to the security implications of greening the economy. Britain replaced coal-fired plants with wind power to reduce carbon emissions, becoming dependent on natural gas imports – especially in calm weather. Traditional suppliers like Russia might see opportunities in volatile fossil fuel prices that result from the transition to net zero. This is not reassuring. Fuel price protests sparked unrest in Kazakhstan this month, but they also brought Britain to a halt 22 years ago.