The Guardian

Another visitor in same motorcycle group hospitalized for ‘severe heat illness’ as other four members treated at scene

A visitor to Death Valley national park died Sunday from heat exposure and another person was hospitalized as the temperature reached 128F (53.3C) in eastern California, officials said.

The two visitors were part of a group of six motorcyclists riding through the Badwater Basin area amid scorching weather, the park said.

The party’s targets of building 1.5m homes over five years and decarbonising the electricity grid by 2030 look a stretch

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A landslide victory for Labour was also a satisfactory result for the vigilantes of the bond market. A Conservative administration that served up Liz Truss’s reckless budget of unfunded giveaways in 2022 has been punished. A Labour party promising fiscal discipline, to the point where it ditched a previous flagship £28bn policy on green investment in case it scared the horses, has been rewarded.

So, yes, one can see why the UK has suddenly acquired haven-like status in the eyes of financial markets. Unlike the US and France, for instance, international investors now know what they’re getting with the UK: a stable government anxious to demonstrate its market-friendly credentials. Meanwhile, inflation is falling and cuts in interest rates lie around the corner. “We believe UK government bonds (gilts) are attractive at current levels,” said Peder Beck-Friis, an economist at Pimco, the enormous bond fund manager.

Working group to look at where birds might be introduced and engage with boroughs and local community in capital

White storks could soon be wheeling in the skies above London and building their huge nests among towers, flats and spires as a result of new rewilding plans.

After the success of the charismatic birds’ successful reintroduction into southern England since 2016, a white stork working group has been established to seek out habitat and gauge the political will to reintroduce the birds to Greater London.

Labour’s victory, alongside strong Green performance, gives next PM mandate to act boldly on net zero, say campaigners

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Labour’s victory in the general election must mark the start of the UK’s transformation to a green and low-carbon economy and society, campaigners and experts have said as the scale of the election win became clear.

The Conservatives’ U-turns on the environment had been “as popular with voters as a root canal”, according to Greenpeace, as the party sank to its worst electoral defeat in modern times.

The best of this week’s wildlife photographs from around the world

Drone footage released by the Grenadian prime minister's office showed widespread destruction on the island of Carriacou after Hurricane Beryl struck. After his visit to Carriacou, Grenada's prime minister, Dickon Mitchell, described the aftermath of the category 4 storm as 'Armageddon-like'. Mitchell said about 98% of the buildings were either damaged or demolished, and the electrical grid and communication systems were almost entirely obliterated

• Hurricane Beryl hits Jamaica after leaving ‘Armageddon-like’ trail in Grenada

An unprecedented storm has caused devastation. Caribbean states need support

The islands that have been hardest hit by Hurricane Beryl will take years to recover. Nine out of 10 homes on Union, which is part of St Vincent and the Grenadines in the eastern Caribbean, were damaged or destroyed on Monday. On Carriacou, which is part of Grenada, hardly any buildings were left unscathed. On Tuesday, the Grenadian prime minister, Dickon Mitchell, described the situation as “almost Armageddon-like”.

The course taken by Beryl meant that Jamaica, which is home to nearly 3 million people, did not receive its full force as had been feared. But houses and roads were flooded, and a woman was killed, taking the overall death toll to at least 10. Barbados and other islands were also damaged.

Study that researchers say highlights chemicals’ ubiquity also shows PFAS association with seafood and red meat

New research aimed at identifying foods that contain higher levels of PFAS found people who eat more white rice, coffee, eggs and seafood typically showed more of the toxic chemicals in their plasma and breast milk.

The study checked samples from 3,000 pregnant mothers, and is among the first research to suggest coffee and white rice may be contaminated at higher rates than other foods. It also identified an association between red meat consumption and levels of PFOS, one of the most common and dangerous PFAS compounds.

From wildflower retreats and Novid rooms to locking yourself in a disabled toilet, hospital staff reveal where they go when they need a moment’s peace

It is no coincidence that ever more extreme politics has come at a time of ever more extreme weather

A disrupted climate and diminished natural world are widening the dividing lines of ideological debate. Left unchecked, this will undermine democracy.

That may not be the first thing on the minds of British voters as they go to the polls on Thursday. It is probably also a minority view in the rest of Europe or the US, where people are too much in the thick of a polycrisis to consider anything outside politics and economics as usual. But from a distance, in my case from the Amazon rainforest, there is a very different explanation for the tremors being witnessed in the old world and the new.

Company blames delay on weak demand and confusion over government policies on ‘tariffs, timings, and taxation’

Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s Ineos has delayed the launch of its Fusilier electric SUV, blaming weak consumer demand and uncertainty about government policies.

Ratcliffe only unveiled plans to produce the low-emission vehicles in February, with production expected to begin in 2027.

We’ve been back twice a week since that first morning. It’s still freezing and we’re still slow, but the shock of it has gone

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When my mum died in 2012, I found a box of her old life-saving medals that she’d been awarded as a teenager. She grew up in public housing in Williamstown, with a full-time working mother and a father who never really returned postwar. She used to say swimming saved her. It gave her a purpose, a sense of place, somewhere to belong when life at home was hard. Later she taught my brother and me to swim, and then my children, instilling in each of us a love of the water that has never gone.

My grandmother stayed in her one-bedroom high-rise tower flat facing the Williamstown beach until she had to move into an aged care home. For her, the smell of the salty sea drifting across land to her window on the fifth floor made her feel home. Gran wasn’t a swimmer, but she was a great supporter of the life saving club, earning lifetime membership in 1961. And when I checked, her name is still on the honour roll.

The entrepreneur claims agency exaggerated the costs of the Coalition plan despite it using best-case scenario South Korea as the benchmark

High-profile entrepreneur Dick Smith entered the ongoing radioactive debate on nuclear energy this week, accusing government agencies of misleading ministers over the costs of reactors and the practicalities of renewables.

But Smith’s complaints about what the Australian Energy Market Operator’s plan for the future of the grid says, or how CSIRO calculated the costs of nuclear, are themselves misleading.

Light pollution acts as ‘midnight fridge’, drawing in young fish, then predators, according to tests in French Polynesia

Artificial light shining from coastlines around the world is acting like “a midnight fridge” full of tasty snacks, threatening young fish who can be drawn to it and who are then eaten by predators also attracted by the brightness, according to a study.

It has long been established that light pollution hampers people’s ability to see the night sky and harms migrating birds, insects and other animals. But its impact on marine ecosystems has rarely been taken into account, said Jules Schligler, the lead author of the study at the international coral ecosystem research centre in Mo’orea, French Polynesia.

Voters and politicians now know slow, incremental change just won’t cut it. The next government must be bold and brave

• Caroline Lucas is a former Green MP

When I entered parliament back in 2010 as the first Green MP, I used every possible trick in the book to push the environment up the UK’s political agenda. In the early days, progress was agonisingly slow. Simply making the case that Britain should be powered by renewables, not fossil fuels, was a daily battle. Every single budget, I would stand up and ask the same question: what about the climate? And then, quite quickly, things finally began to change.

I’ll never forget the moment I realised the environment movement had finally entered the political mainstream. The shift dawned on me during the school strikes five years ago, which brought over a million people worldwide out on to the streets in protest. I stood on top of a makeshift platform on a fire engine outside parliament and saw a vast crowd of young people, stretching as far as the eye could see, demanding climate justice and action.

Caroline Lucas is an environmental activist and former Green MP

Next government urged to have a proper plan for food security, as UK’s climate becomes more unpredictable

UK fruit and vegetable production has plummeted as farms have been hit by extreme weather.

The country suffered the wettest 18 months since records began across the 2023-24 growing year, leaving soil waterlogged and some farms totally underwater. The impact on harvests has been disastrous. Data from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs shows that year-on-year vegetable yields decreased by 4.9% to 2.2m tonnes in 2023, and the production volumes of fruit decreased by 12% to 585,000 tonnes.

Experts believe songbird is suffering from Usutu virus, first detected in UK in 2020

Beloved by Shakespeare and the Beatles, the blackbird and its sweet song have captured the imagination of Britons for centuries.

But now the songbird is facing decline, and the British public has been asked to contribute to a survey by the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) to find out why.

The climate emergency should have been a more prominent theme during an underwhelming election campaign

For all the many televised encounters between party leaders, one huge subject has largely flown under the radar during this underwhelming election campaign. In 2019, at a time when the Brexit crisis had overwhelmed national politics, Channel 4 nevertheless devoted an entire pre-election debate to the climate emergency. Boris Johnson didn’t turn up. But, sensing the mood of the times, as prime minister he was soon committing to a “green industrial revolution”. Climate action was high-profile and it mattered.

Contrast that with last week’s final leaders’ debate between Rishi Sunak and Sir Keir Starmer. None of the questions selected from the audience addressed the environment. Aside from one attempt by Mr Sunak to suggest that Labour’s green plans will lead to higher taxes – feeding into the Conservative party’s wider attack strategy – both leaders focused their energy and political capital elsewhere. It has been much the same throughout the campaign. Economists, industrial leaders and environmental campaigners are united in their desire for more proactive green government. But the politics has become difficult.

Handing vital infrastructure to private investment companies will generate windfalls for investors and leave the rest of us worse off. We need a better plan

• Daniela Gabor is professor of economics and macrofinance at UWE Bristol

The Labour party has a plan for returning to power: it will get BlackRock to rebuild Britain. Its reasoning is straightforward. A cash-strapped government that wants to avoid tax increases or austerity has no choice but to partner with big finance, attracting private investment to rebuild the infrastructure that is crumbling after years of Tory underinvestment. Labour has already done the arithmetic: to mobilise £3 of private capital from institutional investors, you need to offer them £1 in public subsidies. But every time you hear Labour announce such an infrastructure partnership, think of the hidden politics. BlackRock will privatise Britain – our housing, education, health, nature and green energy – with our taxpayer money as sweetener.

BlackRock has long peddled the idea of public-private partnerships for infrastructure, climate and development. Yet its political momentum has recently accelerated. When its chair, Larry Fink, the world’s most powerful financier, sat with world leaders at the G7 summit last month, he promised the following: rich countries need growth, infrastructure investment can deliver that growth, but public debt is too high for the state alone to invest the estimated $75tn (£59tn) necessary by 2040. Trillions, however, are available to asset managers who look after our pensions and insurance contributions (BlackRock, the largest of these firms, manages about $10tn, as a shrinking welfare state pushes us – future pensioners – into its arms).

Daniela Gabor is professor of economics and macrofinance at UWE Bristol

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Decision by supreme court means water companies could be sued for damage caused by dumping of human waste

Water companies could face a spate of legal challenges by people and businesses affected by sewage pollution after a ruling that United Utilities could be sued by a private company for damage caused by the dumping of human waste.

Lawyers said it was a “watershed moment” as the courts had previously ruled that penalties for water companies were a matter for the regulator, and companies could not sue firms for damage caused to their property by sewage pollution.