The Guardian

Production of meat worldwide emits 28 times as much as growing plants, and most crops are raised to feed animals bound for slaughter

The global production of food is responsible for a third of all planet-heating gases emitted by human activity, with the use of animals for meat causing twice the pollution of producing plant-based foods, a major new study has found.

The entire system of food production, such as the use of farming machinery, spraying of fertilizer and transportation of products, causes 17.3bn metric tonnes of greenhouse gases a year, according to the research. This enormous release of gases that fuel the climate crisis is more than double the entire emissions of the US and represents 35% of all global emissions, researchers said.

University of California, Davis study claims to be the first to document personality in golden-mantled ground squirrels

Animal researchers in California have discovered human-like personality traits in squirrels that anybody watching one raiding nuts from a bird table could probably have guessed: they are bold, aggressive, athletic and sociable.

Related: How a Tahoe refuge saved owls, coyotes and raccoons from wildfire

Members of Insulate Britain caused major delays during protest calling for overhaul of home insulation

Environmental protesters have been arrested after they blocked junctions off London’s orbital motorway during the morning rush hour causing major delays.

Members of the protest group Insulate Britain, which calls for the UK government to fully fund an overhaul of insulation of all homes in Britain by 2030, blocked the M25 at a number of junctions, clashing with motorists.

Some states have still been using versions of the welfare reform clause that imposes lifetime bans on assistance for the formerly incarcerated

When Eugene Glover was released from prison in the summer of 2017 he believed he was starting a new chapter in his life, and leaving an old one behind him. After serving more than 14 years behind bars for a drug felony conviction, Glover moved into a halfway house and applied for food assistance.

Climate scientists believe that if Greenland continues to rapidly melt, tens of millions of people around the world could face yearly flooding and displacement by 2030

Many people believed he couldn’t do it. Ski across the Greenland ice sheet, a vast, unmapped, high-elevation plateau of ice and snow? Madness.

But Fridtjof Nansen, a young Norwegian, proved them wrong. In 1888, he and his small party went light and fast, unlike two large expeditions a few years before. And unlike the others, Nansen traveled from east to west, giving himself no option of retreat to a safe base. It would be forward or die trying. He did it in seven weeks, man-hauling his supplies and ascending to 8,900ft (2,700 meters) elevation, where summertime temperatures dropped to -49F (-45C).

Last year, there were a record 227 killings globally. It is our duty to keep resisting the insatiable forces that led to their deaths

Each year, we learn more about the climate crisis. The data flows: ever-rising heat, unprecedented deforestation, record rainfall. And once a year, we also learn more about the human impact of the crisis too, as data is released on the killings of land and environmental activists, the very people highlighting and protesting at the breakdown of our climate. In 2020, that number rose to a record 227 killings worldwide.

Every time, the data hits me like a blow to the face. I’ve spent much of my life as an environmental activist and journalist, and so if I haven’t actually met the people sadly on this list, I’ve met hundreds exactly like them. Strong local people, attached to place and community, seeing their role in defending terrain and ancestral territory. Every person like this around the world is at risk.

And they are at risk, in the end, not so much because of another local person who pulls the trigger or plunges the blade; they’re at risk because they find themselves living on or near something that some corporation is demanding. Like Fikile Ntshangase, the South African grandmother who led a spirited campaign against a coalmine in KwaZulu-Natal province and was shot dead in her home last year. Or Óscar Eyraud Adams, the indigenous activist who, during Mexico’s worst drought in 30 years, vocally advocated for his community’s right to water, as the authorities denied them and granted corporations ever more permits. Oscar was shot dead in Tecate last September.

The demand for the highest possible profit, the quickest possible timeline, the cheapest possible operation, seems to translate eventually into the understanding, somewhere, that the troublemaker must go. The blame rarely if ever makes its way back up to a corporation’s HQ. But it should. Especially since the people who inhabit these places never really share in the riches produced there: colonialism is still running strong, even if it’s dressed up with corporate logos or hidden with offshore bank accounts.

Water companies let raw sewage into English waters more than 400,000 times in 2020, Environment Agency data reveals

One of the first complaints lodged with the post-Brexit environmental watchdog accuses the government and Ofwat of failing to enforce the law to stop water companies from routinely discharging raw sewage into rivers.

The office for environmental protection (OEP) is being asked to investigate why water companies have been able to continually fail to meet duties placed on them by law to treat sewage. The secretary of state for the environment, George Eustice, and the financial regulator, Ofwat, had failed to enforce the law, the complaint said.

A 'megapod' of about 150 humpback whales has been filmed feeding off the New South Wales coast near Bermagui. This is believed to be the second time a pod of this size has been filmed in Australian waters. Footage courtesy of Sapphire Coastal Adventures and David Rogers

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Wind, solar and tidal projects will compete for contracts, including funding for onshore schemes

Renewable energy developers will compete for a share in a £265m subsidy pot as the government aims to support a record number of projects in the sector through a milestone subsidy scheme later this year.

Under the scheme, offshore wind developers will compete for contracts worth up to £200m a year, and onshore wind and solar farms will be in line for their first subsidies in more than five years.

Figures from Global Witness for 2020 show violent resource grab continued unabated despite pandemic

Murders of environment and land defenders hit a record high last year as the violent resource grab in the global south continued unabated despite the pandemic.

New figures released by Global Witness show that 227 people were killed in 2020 while trying to protect forests, rivers and other ecosystems that their livelihoods depended on.

Locals in the host city are being asked to offer a warm welcome to indigenous delegates visiting for Cop26

In October, Calfín Lafkenche of the Mapuche people of Patagonia, on the southernmost tip of Chile, will embark on an 8,000-mile journey across the Atlantic. He won’t be the only one taking such a trip; indigenous people from Peru’s highest mountains will walk for eight hours to board day-long flights, while those from the deepest Amazon will travel for two days to board a canoe bound for their nearest town. Their ultimate destination? Glasgow.

These are just some of the indigenous communities journeying across the globe to make their voices heard for the first time at Cop26, the UN climate change conference taking place in Glasgow from November.

The former EPA scientist is among five who have come forward alleging that the agency has become deeply corrupted

The US Environmental Protection Agency is failing to protect children by ignoring poisons in the environment and focusing on corporate interests, according to a top children’s health official who will testify this week that the agency tried to silence her because of her insistence on stronger preventions against lead poisoning.

“The people of the United States expect the EPA to protect the health of their children, but the EPA is more concerned with protecting the interests of polluting industries,” said Ruth Etzel, former director of the EPA’s Office of Children’s Health Protection (OCHP). The harm being done to children is “irreparable”, she said.

TUC report says producers that don’t clean up operations will wither and die as rivals blaze trail towards carbon net zero

Up to 660,000 jobs will be at serious risk if the UK continues to fall behind other countries in the amount it invests in green infrastructure and jobs, according to an alarming study published on Saturday.

Coming just two months before Boris Johnson’s government hosts the United Nations Climate conference, COP26 in Glasgow, the report by the TUC makes clear that the impact on employment in the UK as a result of jobs moving “offshore” to countries in the vanguard of green investment and technology will be particularly acute in the UK’s industrial heartlands in the north-west, Yorkshire and the Humber.

Campaigners say Sadiq Khan’s support for a four-lane road under the river is at odds with his environmental aims

Burrowing deep under the Thames, Silvertown tunnel is scheduled as the first new road link across the capital’s river for 30 years. But, the four-lane highway, due to be completed in 2025, is about to become the focus of environmental protests in the lead-up to the Cop26 global climate summit in Glasgow in November.

Preliminary construction work has begun and tunnelling is due to begin next spring, but campaigners insist it is not too late to halt the £1bn-plus engineering project and are planning protests at both ends of the tunnel later this month.

Leaked documents that reveal the removal of references to temperature targets set a worrying precedent

When the prime minister, Boris Johnson, launched trade negotiations with Australia in June last year, he lauded the opportunities of trading with a like-minded country, a land that could ply the UK with reasonably priced chocolate biscuits and cheap wine.

Except, of course, when it came down to it, there would always be more to this deal than swapping Penguins for Tim Tams. For the environment, current Australian rules do not match up to ours. On animal welfare, pesticide standards and climate change, the approach of the current Australian government isn’t the same at all.

Munich motor show showcases the latest EVs from Europe – but they’re unlikely to make their way here anytime soon

The Munich motor show is on again and Europe’s biggest carmakers are taking the chance to debut all the latest electric vehicle designs, with some surprising developments.

With governments across Europe moving to ban sales of internal combustion engines by 2030, manufacturers are racing to bring out a range of affordable zero-emissions cars to avoid being left behind.

• Student campaigners: ‘Activism works, plain and simple’

• University president cites need to decarbonize economy

Harvard will divest itself from holdings in fossil fuels, the university’s president, Lawrence Bacow, announced late on Thursday.

Harvard Management Company, which oversees the university’s vast endowment of almost $42bn, has already been reducing its financial exposure to fossil fuels and has no direct investments in companies that explore for or develop further reserves of fossil fuels, Bacow said in a message posted on the university’s website.

Exclusive: crunch meeting of world leaders tabled for this month with China key to success of climate summit

Boris Johnson is planning to convene last-ditch climate talks with the president of China, Xi Jinping, at a crunch meeting of world leaders later this month, in hopes of breaking the global impasse on climate action ahead of the Cop26 climate summit being hosted in Glasgow this November.

Xi will be invited, along with the leaders of about 30 other countries, to a high-level meeting on the sidelines of the UN general assembly in New York on 20 September, the Guardian has learned.

Exclusive: revelations come amid rising concerns over government’s plans to meet net zero target

UK government ministers have held private meetings with fossil fuel and biomass energy producers roughly nine times as often as they met companies involved in clean energy production, despite the increasing urgency of meeting the government’s climate targets.

Analysis by DeSmog, the environmental investigation group, of publicly available data shows that ministers from the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Beis) held 63 private meetings – with one company present, along with ministers and advisers – with fossil fuel and biomass energy producers between 22 July 2019 and 18 March 2021.

In the developing world most people are not factory farming and livestock is essential to preventing poverty and malnutrition

The pandemic has pushed poverty and malnutrition to rates not seen in more than a decade, wiping out years of progress. In 2020, the number of people in extreme poverty rose by 97 million and the number of malnourished people by between 118 million and 161 million.

Recent data from the World Bank and the UN shows how poverty is heavily concentrated in rural communities in Africa, Asia and Latin America where people are surviving by smallholder farming. This autumn there will be two key events that could rally support for them.