The Guardian

Coal-fired stations in Victoria’s Latrobe Valley and NSW’s Lake Macquarie region among biggest hotspots for deadly sulphur dioxide, report finds

Power stations in Victoria’s Latrobe Valley and New South Wales’s Lake Macquarie region have been named on a list of the world’s biggest hotspots for toxic air pollution.

A new report by Greenpeace, published on Monday, used satellite data published by Nasa to analyse the world’s worst sources of sulphur dioxide (SO2) pollution, an irritant gas known to affect human health and one of the main pollutants contributing to deaths from air pollution worldwide.

Researchers say eradication of feral cats is required to reduce the prevalence of the parasite and the disease

Feral cats are not just predators that kill large numbers of Australian wildlife, they may also be spreading parasitic disease to native animal species, according to new research analysing the impact of cat populations in South Australia.

The study, published in the journal Wildlife Research, examined Toxoplasma gondii (T. gondii), a cat-borne parasite that can cause the disease Toxoplasmosis in a range of species.

Australia Institute says claim Australia is only responsible for 1.2% of emissions hides real contribution to climate crisis

Australia’s role as a leader in the global fossil fuel trade is underscored by a report that finds it is the world’s third biggest exporter and fifth biggest miner of fossil-related emissions.

While political debate sometimes emphasises that Australia is responsible for 1.2% of global emissions at home, the analysis by progressive thinktank the Australia Institute says it trails only Russia and Saudi Arabia in exporting fossil fuels.

Giraffes, sharks, glass frogs - and the woolly mammoth - may get boosted protection at summit

From giraffes to sharks, the world’s endangered species could gain better protection at an international wildlife conference.

The triennial summit of Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites), that began on Saturday, will tackle disputes over the conservation of great beasts such as elephants and rhinos, as well as cracking down on the exploitation of unheralded but vital species such as sea cucumbers, which clean ocean floors.

Climate activist is undertaking two-week journey on solar-powered yacht

Four days into its two-week Atlantic crossing, the solar-powered yacht carrying climate activist Greta Thunberg is becalmed in the ocean after a choppy start to the trip, still 2,500 nautical miles from New York.

In an update posted to Twitter around midday on Saturday, the 16-year-old said she was eating and sleeping well and had no sea sickness so far.

You sort your recycling, leave it to be collected – and then what? From councils burning the lot to foreign landfill sites overflowing with British rubbish, Oliver Franklin-Wallis reports on a global waste crisis

An alarm sounds, the blockage is cleared, and the line at Green Recycling in Maldon, Essex, rumbles back into life. A momentous river of garbage rolls down the conveyor: cardboard boxes, splintered skirting board, plastic bottles, crisp packets, DVD cases, printer cartridges, countless newspapers, including this one. Odd bits of junk catch the eye, conjuring little vignettes: a single discarded glove. A crushed Tupperware container, the meal inside uneaten. A photograph of a smiling child on an adult’s shoulders. But they are gone in a moment. The line at Green Recycling handles up to 12 tonnes of waste an hour.

“We produce 200 to 300 tonnes a day,” says Jamie Smith, Green Recycling’s general manager, above the din. We are standing three storeys up on the green health-and-safety gangway, looking down the line. On the tipping floor, an excavator is grabbing clawfuls of trash from heaps and piling it into a spinning drum, which spreads it evenly across the conveyor. Along the belt, human workers pick and channel what is valuable (bottles, cardboard, aluminium cans) into sorting chutes.

The Netherlands has found an ingenious way to combat rising water – build housing that does the same

Could climate change-resistant homes help solve the housing crisis? The Met Office’s conclusion was unequivocal. There is “no doubt” climate change played a role in the record-breaking temperatures that fried the UK and northern Europe last month.

But there was an irony in this year’s latest heatwave too. The scorching heat that sparked fears of buckled train tracks and made many of us yearn for rain was a symptom of a gradual shift that isn’t just raising temperatures but is making flooding more likely too.

Vets say plastic caused orphan mammal’s infection and should serve as warning about pollution

An orphaned dugong named Marium, who became an internet star after being rescued in Thailand in April, has died.

Veterinarians caring for the dugong off the island of Koh Libong, in south Thailand’s Trang province, said an infection caused by ingesting plastic contributed to her death. They added that the loss of the animal, named “the nation’s sweetheart” by Thailand’s department of marine and coastal resources (DMCR), should serve as a warning about the effects of plastic waste on wildlife.

Things are not under control when it comes to Australia meeting our Paris target, even if Scott Morrison wants us to believe that

We’ll get to climate, and the rumble in the Pacific, but I want to begin closer to home. It’s been a busy news week, so you might have missed an excellent story from my colleague Adam Morton on Tuesday revealing that a coalmine in Queensland has nearly doubled its greenhouse gas emissions in two years without penalty under a Morrison government mechanism that is supposed to impose limits on industrial pollution.

According to documents released under freedom of information laws, mining company Anglo American was given the green light under the safeguards mechanism to increase its emissions by about 1m tonnes at its Moranbah North mine, in central Queensland. The case study matters, because it helps us separate spin from substance.

Activists vow to keep on after council votes to authorise only one day’s school absence

Young activists have vowed to keep protesting in Edinburgh despite the city council saying it will only authorise pupils to miss school once a year to attend climate strikes.

Pupils have been attending protests on Fridays outside the Scottish parliament on an ad hoc basis after the council granted permission in March.

London’s Smithfield Market part of next wave of Extinction Rebellion climate protests

Thousands of animal rights and environment activists are planning to blockade Smithfield Market – the largest wholesale meat market in the UK – in the next wave of Extinction Rebellion climate protests.

A new group calling itself Animal Rebellion says it has almost 2,000 volunteers signed up to take part in a two-week blockade of the central London market from 7 October.

Endangered bonobo, migrating storks and one of the world’s biggest raptors

High up in the French Alps, the climbers who spend their days on the rocks and glaciers have come to a grim conclusion: the mountains are crumbling around them

As UK rents rise and online retailers eat into their margins, shops struggle to survive

In the early 1930s a young William Laker would cycle the 50-odd miles from his home in Kent to Crystal Palace in south London to visit the woman who would, half a century later, become my grandmother.

There is every chance Grandpa would have popped into the small bike shop at 3&5 Central Hill in Crystal Palace. That very shop remained open for about 97 years, serving generations of cyclists, but in July the current custodian of what is now called Blue Door Bicycles, David Hibbs, announced it is to close its door for good.

Australia’s prime minister Scott Morrison came under fire from Tuvalu’s leader Enele Sopoaga

Critical talks at the Pacific Islands Forum almost collapsed twice amid “fierce” clashes between the Australian prime minister, Scott Morrison, and Tuvalu’s prime minister, Enele Sopoaga, over Australia’s “red lines” on climate change.

Ralph Regenvanu, Vanuatu’s foreign minister, who was part of the drafting committee of the forum communique and observed the leaders’ retreat, said there was heated discussion over the Australian delegation’s insistence on the removal of references to coal, setting a target of limiting global warming to below 1.5C and announcing a strategy for zero emissions by 2050.

The poison-filled traps are used by the federal government to kill coyotes, foxes and other animals for farmers and ranchers

After sustained public outcry, the Trump administration has voided its decision to reauthorize controversial cyanide traps for killing wildlife.

The traps, which are known as M-44s and dubbed “cyanide bombs” by critics, are spring-loaded devices that emit a spray of sodium cyanide to kill their targets. The traps are most frequently used by Wildlife Services, a little-known federal agency inside the United States Department of Agriculture, to kill coyotes, foxes and other animals at the behest of private agriculture operators.

Environment groups fear possibly ‘weakened’ earthquake risk rules after report on Cuadrilla drilling

Environmental groups have voiced fears that the government is preparing to row back on fracking regulations after officials said they were considering reviewing earthquake safeguard rules.

The limits affecting shale gas fracking are strongly contested by the industry because they bring an immediate halt to fracking if even a minor tremor of 0.5 on the Richter scale is recorded.

A video showing a cannon shooting fish over a dam went viral – but how does it work? CEO and inventor of cannon has answers

Earlier this week, a video shot through the Twitter feed fray with the velocity of a fish hurtling through a pneumatic tube.

The short video (set to house music, strangely) is a compilation of clips showing variations of the fish-shooting technology that Washington-based company Whooshh first developed five years ago. Not only has the video given the internet an ideal subject of absurdist fascination to dethrone last week’s 30-50 feral hogs, it’s also raised a lot of questions, like, “Wait, what?”, and “How does the fish feel about this?” and, “Can they potentially do this with humans?” (I can’t be the only person who was wondering this.)

The Australian designers and environmental activists Alex Wadelton and Tom Whitty have recreated scenes from The Lion King using Woolworths plastic ooshies figures set in landfill plastic trash settings. Their Future Landfill project is a protest against the major Australian supermarket chains Coles and Woolworths, which they say are ‘running reckless promotions that encourage the mass production of tiny plastic toys with a short-term mindset’. ⁣

Woolworths shoppers are being given Lion King plastic figures if they spend over $20 in store. Environmentalists worry the majority of these plastic toys will spend most of their time on this planet buried in the earth.

Woolworths says its Lion King ooshies can be recycled in store, but in the fine print the recycling scheme lasts for about two months after the promotion ends. Coles, however, only gives an option to recycle the packaging of its Little Shop plastic figures.

• Why did two farmers destroy a rare ooshie live on the Today show?

Theory linking seismic activity and appearance of rare oarfish fails to hold water

People in Japan hoping to predict the next big earthquake should ignore mysterious deep-sea fish after experts said rare sightings of the creatures on the country’s beaches did not, as some had believed, foretell a seismic calamity.

University researchers said they had debunked the theory of oarfish as a harbinger of doom by comparing sightings of deep-sea fish, including those caught in fishermen’s nets, with earthquake records going back more than 90 years.