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How does a massive coal push lasting decades line up with what it has pledged? Leaders of low-lying Pacific nations might appreciate some answers

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The most obvious point to make about Tanya Plibersek’s approval of three coalmine expansions on Tuesday is the most important. The potential climate impact is substantial, and far beyond anything else we have seen approved so far by the Albanese government.

Labor has been criticised for its support of new fossil fuel developments before, but the four coal developments it had backed prior to this were relatively small. They are expected to add about 156m tonnes of heat-trapping carbon dioxide to the atmosphere if fully developed.

Nine climate protesters have stopped a coal train headed to the Port of Newcastle in opposition to the federal government’s approval of three new mining projects. Rising Tide, the group behind the move, said in a statement that the three projects – Whitehaven Coal’s Narrabri thermal coal project to 2066, Mach Energy’s Mount Pleasant thermal coal project to 2058 and Yancoal’s Ashton coal project to 2064 – would create 1.4bn tonnes of emissions

• Tanya Plibersek approves three coalmine expansions in move criticised as ‘the opposite of climate action’

Until the government changes its stance on the environment and the war in Gaza and Lebanon, there is nothing to celebrate

On Monday morning, we walked into the main hall of Labour’s annual conference in Liverpool, before the keynote speech of the chancellor, Rachel Reeves. What we did next, you might have seen.

Shortly after Reeves began her address, two of us stood to speak out on Labour’s complicity in suspected Israeli war crimes, and the party’s ties to climate-wrecking corporations. We were there on behalf of Climate Resistance, a group campaigning to end the cosy relationship between politics and the fossil fuel industry. Just like arms manufacturers, oil companies have been guilty of hindering democratic processes with donations and lobbying, putting human lives on the line for their own profits.

Jack McGinn is a climate activist with Climate Resistance

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Appointee was a climate chief at the World Bank and will lead UK’s return to high-level environmental diplomacy

• Who is Rachel Kyte, the UK’s new climate envoy?

A former climate chief of the World Bank has been appointed to lead the UK’s efforts to forge a global coalition on climate action, the Guardian can reveal.

Rachel Kyte, who previously served as special representative for the UN and a vice-president of the World Bank, will take up the role of climate envoy to lead the UK’s return to the front ranks of global climate diplomacy.

When sighting rates for basking sharks are high they are low for minke whales, says monitoring programme

The highest ever recorded numbers of minke whales and the lowest number of basking sharks were observed in the Hebrides in 2023, according to a report.

The latest findings of the 20-year monitoring programme by the Hebridean Whale and Dolphin Trust suggest a possible association between these two highly mobile and long-lived species. When sighting rates for basking sharks are high, they are low for minke whales, and vice versa.

Researchers find climate crisis aggravated the four days of heavy rainfall and deadly floods

• ‘We’re getting rid of everything’: floods destroy homes and lives in Czech Republic

Planet-heating pollution doubled the chance of the extreme levels of rain that hammered central Europe in September, a study has found.

Researchers found global heating aggravated the four days of heavy rainfall that led to deadly floods in countries from Austria to Romania.

Narrative that transition has stalled ‘demonstrably not true’, researcher says, but investment and construction must accelerate

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Large-scale renewable energy investment and construction in Australia is rebounding this year after a slump, but will need to accelerate to reach the pace needed to meet the Albanese government’s goal for 2030.

The country could add more than 7 gigawatts of renewable energy capacity this year, up from 5.3 GW last year, according to data released by the Clean Energy Regulator.

Amaga pseudobama was first spotted in 2020 in North Carolina and has now spread to Florida and Georgia

A new species of invasive flatworm has been discovered in the United States and has been found in several states in the south, according to a new paper.

The species, named Amaga pseudobama, was discovered by an international team of researchers and first spotted in 2020 in North Carolina. It is thought to be native to South America.

‘It’s like time-travelling,’ says Dr Rebecca West – ‘we’re reversing and going back to what it would have been like 200 years ago’

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Quolls and bettongs delivered to the far north-west corner of New South Wales are the final piece of a decade-long project to reintroduce seven locally extinct mammals to the arid desert landscape.

Twenty burrowing bettongs and 20 western quolls have been released into Sturt national park as part of the Wild Deserts project. They joined previously released and flourishing populations of bilbies, bandicoots and mulgaras (a small but ferocious native predator).

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Exclusive: council issues advisory as investigation begins and documents reveal estimates of PFOA emissions

People living near a chemicals plant in Lancashire have been told to wash and peel vegetables from their gardens before eating them, while an investigation into potential contamination of soil in the area with a banned toxic chemical gets under way.

The chemical PFOA, one of the PFAS family of about 15,000 chemicals, does not break down in the environment and last year was categorised as a human carcinogen by the World Health Organization. It is also toxic to reproduction and has been linked to a range of health problems such as thyroid disease and increased cholesterol.

Norwegians are putting their natural environment (and weekend activities) ahead of tourism’s economic benefits

In Norway, nature is something of a national obsession. Norwegian children are taught that “there is no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing”, and Norwegian babies are packed into thermals and overalls and taken on day trips to the woods. Cross-country skiing, hunting for wild mushrooms or cloudberries, or huffing and puffing up a mountain are standard weekend activities.

The recent decision to scrap a campaign that aimed to attract more foreign tourists to the country’s rural landscapes was a stark reminder of this: rather than encouraging tourists and the income they provide, many Norwegians would prefer to protect their natural environment.

The winning images in this year’s Bird Photographer of the Year competition have been selected from 23,000 entries from around the world. The overall winner Patricia Homonylo’s image showed birds killed by colliding with windows

• Wildlife photographer of the year 2024 – preview

Flooding in central and southern England caused widespread travel disruptions and closed schools after some areas experienced a month's worth of rainfall in 24 hours. In parts of Bedfordshire, roads turned into rivers, with cars making their way through submerged streets. The London fire brigade said it received hundreds of calls about flooding-related incidents, including people needing to be rescued from cars and homes

• Flooding causes chaos after month’s rain falls in a day in parts of England

Ocean acidification close to critical threshold, say scientists, posing threat to marine ecosystems and global liveability

Industrial civilisation is close to breaching a seventh planetary boundary, and may already have crossed it, according to scientists who have compiled the latest report on the state of the world’s life-support systems.

“Ocean acidification is approaching a critical threshold”, particularly in higher-latitude regions, says the latest report on planetary boundaries. “The growing acidification poses an increasing threat to marine ecosystems.”

Drone footage shows flooded streets in the village of Érsekcsanád in southern Hungary after heavy rainfall caused the Danube River to overflow. Parts of the region have experienced five times the average rainfall for the month of September, leaving large swathes of land submerged in floodwater. Central Europe was recently hit by extensive flooding, which left several people dead and caused billions of euros in damage.

• Floods in Poland and wildfires in Portugal show reality of climate breakdown, says EU

There’s a war brewing between those who want to plan for future challenges and those who want to turn back the tide

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The leadership of Australian farming is a club that has strict rules. Like the classic movie Fight Club, the first rule about farm club is you don’t talk about farm club.

But that doesn’t always work out well for farmers. There are clever people in the leadership club who are loath to speak out.

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Firms underreported true scale of sewage pollution for 10 years, which allowed them to set higher bills, tribunal told

Six water companies overcharged customers between £800m and £1.5bn by “significantly or systematically” underreporting the true scale of their sewage pollution of rivers and waterways, a tribunal has heard.

In the first environmental competition class action against water companies in England, lawyers argued that the privatised firms had abused their monopoly position to mislead regulators over the amount of sewage they were discharging from their assets over the past 10 years.

Requiring key sectors to switch to clean energy sources could trigger benevolent cascades, report claims

In the terminology of the climate and ecological crises the phrase “tipping point” is loaded with dreadful implications.

It evokes a climate breakdown supercharged by the mass escape of methane locked in Siberian permafrost, or the great currents of the oceans smothered by freshwater melting from the Greenland ice sheet, or the Amazon turning from great rainforest to parched savannah after the felling of one too many trees.

The opposition leader, Peter Dutton, detailed the Coalition’s nuclear power plan in a speech in Sydney but did not announce its cost, saying it is coming 'in due course'. 'Our nuclear plan requires a significant upfront cost, and you can look at the international examples to see as much. But a whole new and vast transmission network and infrastructure won’t be needed under the plan that we’re putting forward,' Dutton said

• Dutton praises Canada to sell nuclear plan. But does Ontario really have cheaper power?

Price of electric cars falls again with the MG4 hatchback cheapest at $30,990 but experts warn high-end EV sales may stall

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Electric vehicles have broken through another price barrier in Australia, with the cost of one new model reduced to less than $31,000 for the first time.

But industry experts say the fierce price battle is only playing out among cheaper and smaller electric cars, with Australian taxes reducing competition at the other end of the market.