The Guardian

Defusing the climate emergency requires defusing threats to American democracy

A year ago last Thursday, Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy were fleeing for their lives as a violent mob swarmed the halls of the US Capitol. With their personal safety at risk, the two most powerful Republicans on Capitol Hill at last stood up to Donald Trump. In a heated phone call, McCarthy, the House minority leader, fruitlessly implored the president to call off the mob. Senate majority leader McConnell later called the rioters “terrorists” and said Trump was “morally responsible” for the violence.

But McConnell and McCarthy soon slunk back to enabling Trump’s assaults on democracy. They were quiet while Trump insisted the 2020 election was stolen and that anyone who disagreed must be purged from public office. They stayed mute as Trump supporters threatened violence against election officials and Republican-dominated state legislatures rewrote laws and procedures to prevent fair voting.

According to Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, cases will increase between 2.2% and 3.9% depending on emission levels

Rising temperatures due to the climate crisis will lead to a rise in people suffering from kidney stones – a painful medical condition exacerbated by heat and dehydration, according to a new study.

Researchers used two climate scenarios to estimate the burden of heat and humidity related kidney stone disease by the end of the century in South Carolina – a state in the south-east US, a region which currently has a higher than average incidence rate.

An exclusive Jane Goodall self-portrait is among prints from 100 leading wildlife photographers being sold to help protect endangered habitats. Prints available at vitalimpacts.org until 17 January

Social enterprise wins grant to send out composting worms that can turn waste into high-grade fertiliser

It used to be that the early bird would get the worm, but households, schools and even prisons can now have the invertebrates delivered free to their door – if they get a wriggle on.

A Nottingham-based initiative, the Urban Worm Community Interest Company (UWC), is on a mission to “worm up” the UK by kickstarting an urban worm farming movement that can create high-grade fertiliser from banana skins and old socks.

Government refusal to link carbon market to EU’s has led to higher cost for British businesses

British businesses are paying substantially more to produce carbon dioxide than their EU rivals because of the government’s refusal to link the UK carbon market to the bigger European market after Brexit.

The difference is putting UK industry at a significant competitive disadvantage to European rivals, at a time of soaring energy prices, but does not result in any additional benefit to the environment.

With a zillion images of themselves to choose from, many taken by a reverent state photographer, Boris and Carrie Johnson used a picture of their dog, Dilyn, for their recent Christmas card.

If unlikely to appeal to the current pope, the pet is, they presumably concluded, more generally inoffensive, ostensibly uninvolved in the family’s tireless requisitioning of free luxury goods and, on a more positive note, a pointed reminder of the household’s remaining claim to virtue. Or if that’s putting it too strongly: to their formal recognition as sentient beings.

Globetrotting presenter hopes ‘value’ of programmes offsets their carbon footprint

Explorer and television presenter Simon Reeve is troubled by the carbon footprint of the travel documentaries he makes and sometimes feels a hypocrite, he has confessed.

Talking candidly about his climate change guilt and also reflecting on his unhappy teenage years on Sunday’s Desert Island Discs, Reeve accepts that his journeys to Australia, Cuba and the Caribbean with the BBC have given him a damaging environmental record.

Government scheme to replace EU agricultural payments fuelled by ‘blind optimism’ and still lacking crucial details, say MPs

The government’s plans for a post-Brexit scheme to support British farming are based on little more than “blind optimism” and risk increasing the UK’s reliance on food imports, a parliamentary inquiry has warned.

The EU’s scheme of subsidies – known as the common agricultural policy (CAP) and worth £3bn-a-year to UK farmers – was one of the long-running complaints of Eurosceptics, who saw the ability of Britain to draw up its own scheme of payments as one of the major benefits of Brexit. Ministers had said the new scheme would be used to increase the environmental benefits of agriculture.

Israeli researchers say their fish – named after characters from Pride and Prejudice – reveal navigation is a universal ability

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It might be an imaginary character straight out of a Dr Seuss book: The goldfish who could drive. But it’s real. Incredibly, Israeli researchers created a robotic car and report that they taught six fish – named after characters from Pride and Prejudice – to navigate it on land.

It’s all in the name of science, of course. The team had been dreaming up ways to test fish navigation for a while, according to Shachar Givon from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, first author of a study published in the journal Behavioural Brain Research.

Conservatives look like cranks today, not because of personal failings of this or that politician, but because they cannot deal with the crises of the modern world. It’s not that they don’t have answers – rightwing thinkers spit them out faster than a machine gun fires bullets. It’s just that their answers are irrelevant and, even in Tory terms, self-defeating.

All viable responses to global warming, vaccination, the job losses artificial intelligence will bring and failing public health enhance the role of the state. It must provide jobs and benefits to society’s losers, protect their health and drastically reconfigure markets to sustain the planet. Small states that allow sovereign individuals and companies to decide for themselves now feel as antiquated as Margaret Thatcher’s handbag and pearls.

Critics attacked Don’t Look Up for being over the top. But the mania for NFTs shows how on-the-money the movie is

On 24 December, the movie Don’t Look Up began streaming on Netflix following a limited release in cinemas. It’s a satirical story, directed by Adam McKay, about what happens when a lowly PhD student (played by Jennifer Lawrence) and her supervisor (Leonardo DiCaprio) discover that an Everest-size asteroid is heading for Earth. What happens is that they try to warn their fellow Earthlings about this existential threat only to find that their intended audience isn’t interested in hearing such bad news.

The movie has been widely watched but has had a pasting from critics. It was, said the Observer’s Simran Hans, a “shrill, desperately unfunny climate-change satire”. The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw found it a “laboured, self-conscious and unrelaxed satire… like a 145-minute Saturday Night Live sketch with neither the brilliant comedy of Succession… nor the seriousness that the subject might otherwise require”.

The advent of electric vehicles will eventually extend to motorbikes, despite a deep cultural attachment to the internal combustion engine on two wheels

The guttural roar rising from the start-up pits was flag marshal Shane Adderton’s cue. The 34-year-old technician has been involved in the motorbike world since he was a teenager, and volunteering at South Australia’s racing mecca of Mallala Motorsport Park always gave him a special thrill.

“When you hear them start up and leave the pits, that sound is something you look forward to,” he says. “That note of the exhaust – the emotion it creates is part of the attractiveness.”

Palaeontologists from the Australian Museum have made a remarkable discovery outside of a small town in New South Wales, Australia. Encased in the hard brown rocks of McGrath's Flat are the inhabitants of a rainforest that existed about 15 million years ago. 

Thousands of fossils have been revealed – from flowering plants to fruits and seeds, insects, spiders, pollen and fish

The region’s air typically doesn’t suit strikes – so they have become an important climate crisis indicator

The high Arctic saw a dramatic rise in lightning in 2021 in what could be one of the most spectacular manifestations of the climate crisis.

In a region where sightings were once rare, the Earth’s northernmost region saw 7,278 lightning strikes in 2021 – nearly double as many as the previous nine years combined.

Swedish and Dutch firms claim their technology could replace gas and oil boilers without added insulation

A new type of heat pump that may soon be rolled out in the UK could ease the shift for homes to low-carbon heating but is no quick fix, experts say.

The Swedish company Vattenfall and the Dutch company Feenstra claim their new high-temperature heat pump, being launched in the Netherlands this year, could replace gas and oil boilers in UK homes without the need for added insulation or new radiators like other heat pumps.

The best of this week’s wildlife pictures, including a murmuration of starlings, sea turtle hatchlings and a snake in the grass

Derelict stables at secret Sussex location will be revamped to house greater horseshoe bats

Rare bats that are breeding in south-east England for the first time in a century will be encouraged to rear their young in an innovative maternity unit – a tumbledown stable block.

The derelict stables at a secret location in Sussex will next month be purchased for greater horseshoe bats by the Vincent Wildlife Trust and Sussex Bat Group after the endangered species was discovered breeding in region after a 100-year absence.

George Eustice tells sector facing margins cut to bone by supermarkets they should demand higher incomes

Farmers must “stand their ground” on price inflation and ensure that the rising costs they face are reflected in the prices paid to them by supermarkets for their produce, the UK’s environment, food and rural affairs secretary has demanded.

George Eustice told the online Oxford Farming Conference on Thursday that rising input costs should result in higher incomes for farmers, but that increasing farm gate prices need not result in food inflation for consumers.

Official decision calling Project Servator intimidatory quashed by ‘quality assurance process’

Environmental activists who accused police of intimidation and harassment have had a review decision in their favour withdrawn in controversial circumstances.

The decision, produced by the office of the police and crime commissioner for Devon and Cornwall, was particularly critical of Project Servator, a national counter-terrorism strategy, saying it was “increasingly being used as an intimidatory and oppressive national policing tactic”.

Project Servator is “apparently increasingly being used as an intimidatory and oppressive national policing tactic”.

While police witnesses were interviewed about the incident, those visited by the police were not. “There appears to have been a quiescent acceptance of the police account of their actions by the [police] professional standards department.”

Potential misconduct by police officers who visited the quarry and boatyard should also be considered.

The matter should have been referred to the Independent Office for Police Conduct “given the politically sensitive and national implications of such disproportionality in a protest situation”.

Hundreds of new species include pink voodoo lily and an ylang-ylang tree named after Leonardo DiCaprio

A ghost orchid that grows in complete darkness, an insect-trapping tobacco plant and an “exploding firework” flower are among the new species named by scientists in the last year. The species range from a voodoo lily from Cameroon to a rare tooth fungus unearthed near London, UK.

A new tree from the ylang-ylang family is the first to be named in 2022 and is being named after the actor and environmentalist Leonardo DiCaprio. He campaigned to revoke a logging concession which threatened the African tree, which features glossy yellow flowers on its trunk.