The Guardian

Passengers face ‘near impossible’ choice between low prices and climate-friendly travel, says Which?

Train fares on popular UK routes are 50% more expensive than plane fares despite rail journeys causing 80% lower carbon dioxide emissions, according to analysis by the consumer group Which?.

It said passengers face a “near impossible” choice between low ticket prices and climate-friendly travel. More people are taking holidays in the UK due to coronavirus and airlines have launched dozens of new domestic routes.

Delayed decarbonisation plan for achieving net zero emissions for transport by 2050 is published

New diesel and petrol lorries will be banned in Britain by 2040, under a “greenprint” to decarbonise all types of transport by 2050.

The British government’s long-awaited transport decarbonisation plan, finally published on 15 July, will include what is being billed as a “world-leading pledge” to end the sale of all new polluting vehicles and move towards net zero domestic aviation emissions by 2040.

Vessels laden with fish claim to have sheltered from storm, but Gwadar fishers want catch auctioned locally

Pakistan has detained five Chinese trawlers on suspicion of illegal fishing near its strategic port city of Gwadar, as a wave of protests swept across the region led by fishers concerned about losing control of their fishing grounds to China.

The Chinese trawlers, loaded with fish, were taken into custody by the Pakistan Maritime Security Agency (PMSA), which has begun an investigation into their suspicious presence in Gwadar, where China has built a deep-sea port as part of its global belt and road initiative.

Representatives from nine voting nations among guests on snorkelling trip as Morrison government lobbies against Unesco recommendation

Ambassadors from more than a dozen countries will be flown to the Great Barrier Reef for a snorkelling trip on Thursday as part of the Morrison government’s lobbying campaign to keep the ocean jewel off the world heritage in danger list.

The government’s official reef ambassador Warren Entsch will host the Canberra-based diplomatic group which, he said, included nine countries with voting rights at the upcoming world heritage committee meeting.

Fines are treated as a business cost, the Environment Agency is toothless – the whole thing stinks

What’s remarkable is not that a water company knowingly and deliberately poured billions of litres of raw sewage into the sea to cut its costs. What’s remarkable is that the Environment Agency investigated and prosecuted it. Every day, water companies pour tonnes of unprocessed filth into England’s rivers and seas, and the government does nothing.

Even in the wake of the sentence last week, under which Southern Water was fined £90m, the company’s own maps show a continued flow of raw filth into coastal waters. Same shit, different day. The only occasions on which water companies are allowed by law to release raw sewage are when “exceptional rainfall” overwhelms their treatment works. But the crap keeps coming, rain or no rain.

Center Parcs proposal for 223-hectare woodland site faces opposition from activists and locals

Center Parcs has been criticised over plans to build a complex on rare bird habitat in Sussex, next to a site of special scientific interest.

The holiday company announced it was applying to create its sixth UK holiday village on 223 hectares (551 acres) of woodland in Worth Forest, West Sussex. They hope to attract Londoners down to the wood, which was selected because of its transport links to the capital.

Southern Water was one of the worst-performing companies in 2020, according to report

The water industry in England is failing to cut pollution from spills of raw sewage into rivers and coastal waters, the Environment Agency has said.

Southern Water, which was fined a record £90m last week for dumping billions of litres of raw sewage into the sea, was one of the worst-performing companies in 2020, according to the EA report on Tuesday.

A site in WA the size of greater Sydney has been chosen for the $100bn project to convert wind and solar power into green fuels

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An international consortium wants to build what would be the world’s biggest renewable energy hub in Australia’s south-west to convert wind and solar power into green fuels like hydrogen.

The group of energy companies announced the proposal over a 15,000 sq km area that could have a 50 gigawatt capacity and cost $100bn.

Six-week-old kit seen on National Trust’s Holnicote Estate in Somerset after pair of adults were reintroduced

A baby beaver has been born on Exmoor for the first time in 400 years after two adults were successfully reintroduced by the National Trust in January 2020.

Camera footage shows the six-week-old kit swimming to the family lodge with its mother in a large enclosure on the Holnicote Estate in Somerset, where two Eurasian beavers were released for the first time in the trust’s 125-year history.

London, and the other areas in the south of England, were hit by torrential downpours that resulted in significant flooding on Monday night.

London fire brigade said its 999 control officers received more than 150 calls to flooding incidents in the capital. Forecasters said the torrential showers were expected to continue through most of the evening

Letter to world heritage committee comes as minister embarks on week of lobbying against change

Australia’s major environment groups have written to the UN’s world heritage committee, urging it to put the Great Barrier Reef on its “in danger” list as the Morrison government ramps up its lobbying against the change.

The environment minister, Sussan Ley, was due to land in Europe on Monday evening for a week-long campaign against the in-danger recommendation for the ocean jewel.

Ingrid Horrocks learned to swim in the wild – but no river or lake in the region she grew up in is ‘swimmable’ any more

For most of those of us who swim, swimming is not something we think about: it is something we do.

I learned to swim in the sea, as some of us did in Aotearoa New Zealand in the early 1980s, walking down to the beach with my Auckland primary school. One of my earliest memories is of graduating to the “heads under” group and of sucking salt from my hair.

Minnesota pet owners warned not to release fish into wild, where they wreak havoc on native species

Authorities in Minnesota have appealed to aquarium owners to stop releasing pet fish into waterways, after several huge goldfish were pulled from a local lake.

Officials in Burnsville, about 15 miles south of Minneapolis, said released goldfish can grow to several times their normal size and wreak havoc on indigenous species.

After 46 years, I’m lowering my expectations. Who needs more than ice-cream and a few salty snacks?

Summer is here: I can smell it (lighter-fuel-doused charcoal and the ammonia punch of After Bite dabbed on giant angry weals) and hear it (strimmers and mowers and the ice-cream van). I can feel it too: a slither of itchy unease at the core of my being, a tight-chested sense that everything is slipping out of my control when I see a few sun icons on my phone.

“Which summer tribe are you?” the magazine quizzes ask, but I’m not mermaidcore, Riviera chic or Amish prairie cowgirl: I’m “looking longingly at cardigans” – and not just because this season has got off to such a damp and chilly start.

Ambitious draft goals to halt biodiversity loss revealed, with proposed changes to food production expected to ‘raise eyebrows’

Eliminating plastic pollution, reducing pesticide use by two-thirds, halving the rate of invasive species introduction and eliminating $500bn (£360bn) of harmful environmental government subsidies a year are among the targets in a new draft of a Paris-style UN agreement for biodiversity loss.

The goals set out by the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) to help halt and reverse the ecological destruction of Earth by the end of the decade also include protecting at least 30% of the world’s oceans and land and providing a third of climate crisis mitigation through nature by 2030.

People are dying. Aquatic animals are baking in their shells. Fruit is being cooked on the tree. It’s time to act

Human beings crave clarity, immediacy, landmark events. We seek turning points, because our minds are good at recognizing the specific – this time, this place, this sudden event, this tangible change. This is why we were never very good, most of us, at comprehending climate change in the first place. The climate was an overarching, underlying condition of our lives and planet, and the change was incremental and intricate and hard to recognize if you weren’t keeping track of this species or that temperature record. Climate catastrophe is a slow shattering of the stable patterns that governed the weather, the seasons, the species and migrations, all the beautifully orchestrated systems of the holocene era we exited when we manufactured the anthropocene through a couple of centuries of increasingly wanton greenhouse gas emissions and forest destruction.

This spring, when I saw the shockingly low water of Lake Powell, I thought that maybe this summer would be a turning point. At least for the engineering that turned the southwest’s Colorado River into a sort of plumbing system for human use, with two huge dams that turned stretches of a mighty river into vast pools of stagnant water dubbed Lake Powell, on the eastern Utah/Arizona border, and Lake Mead, in southernmost Nevada. It’s been clear for years that the overconfident planners of the 1950s failed to anticipate that, while they tinkered with the river, industrial civilization was also tinkering with the systems that fed it.

State officials report ‘unprecedented’ deaths due to starvation as pollution and algal blooms take toll

More manatees have died already this year than in any other year in Florida’s recorded history, primarily from starvation due to the loss of seagrass beds, state officials have said.

The Florida Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission reported that 841 manatee deaths were recorded between 1 January and 2 July, breaking the previous record of 830 that died during the whole of 2013 because of an outbreak of toxic red tide.

When Unesco recommended the reef be placed on the ‘in danger’ list, the Coalition’s response was to shift the blame. We must do better

• Unesco recommends reef world heritage site be listed as ‘in danger’
• Timeline: decades of damage and Australia’s fight to stop ‘in danger’ listing

Escaping responsibility has become the recurrent theme of the Morrison government. Whether it is the glacial progress of the vaccination rollout, dealing with the megafires two summers ago, or the parlous state of the Great Barrier Reef, someone else is always to blame.

When Unesco released its recommendation to the World Heritage Committee in June to place the Great Barrier Reef on the “in danger” list, the first reaction of the federal government was to blame China.

Exclusive: Environment officials raised concerns that damage to habitat on Robbins Island could be difficult to offset

A proposed new windfarm on Robbins Island off north-west Tasmania could threaten a disease-free Tasmanian devil population, according to federal environment officials, who say the damage to habitat could be difficult to offset.

Correspondence obtained by Guardian Australia under freedom of information laws shows officials raised concerns that no comparable habitat existed anywhere else to compensate for the effects the project could have on the island’s unique devil colony, which is considered a stronghold for the survival of the species.

The Delta variant is rattling markets. But the temptation to soothe them with quantitative easing must be resisted

Falling share prices. Investors piling into the safe haven of bonds. Rising infection rates of the Delta variant of coronavirus. The events of the past week have demonstrated one thing clearly: this isn’t over yet.

A couple of months ago the way out of the crisis looked clear. Immunisation programmes were allowing developed countries to remove restrictions on activity. A pick-up in growth was expected to continue without interruption. Rising government bond yields were seen as a sign of life returning to normal.