The Guardian

Government spends less than $1m for cut equivalent to only 0.01% of Australia’s annual greenhouse gas pollution

The Morrison government’s main climate change policy, the emissions reduction fund, has been labelled “a joke” after its latest auction bought cuts equivalent to only 0.01% of Australia’s annual greenhouse gas pollution.

While the prime minister, Scott Morrison, announced prior to the election that the policy would get an additional $2bn funding, the first post-election auction from the fund dedicated less than $1m to just three emissions reduction projects.

Residents of Whaley Bridge, Derbyshire, have been evacuated and told to make arrangements to stay elsewhere 'for a number of days' after heavy rain damaged the dam holding back the Toddbrook reservoir, leaving it at risk of collapse.

• Peak District town evacuated as dam threatens to burst

Dishwater and bathwater can be used to give vital support that councils often cannot afford to young trees

Instead of letting your dirty dishwater go down the drain, consider using it to water the trees on your street. That is the message from tree experts, who say survival rates for urban trees could be boosted significantly by volunteers.

Russell Miller, a London-based arboricultural consultant, said: “If you plant trees from good stock, at the right time, and provide enough water, you’d lose almost none prematurely. But get that wrong, and more than half can die.”

Redirecting small portion of subsidies would unleash clean energy revolution, says report

Switching just some of the huge subsidies supporting fossil fuels to renewables would unleash a runaway clean energy revolution, according to a new report, significantly cutting the carbon emissions that are driving the climate crisis.

Coal, oil and gas get more than $370bn (£305bn) a year in support, compared with just $100bn for renewables, the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) report found. Just 10-30% of the fossil fuel subsidies would pay for a global transition to clean energy, the IISD said.

Thinktank says country must focus on building abundance to avoid 2008-style financial crisis

Britain needs an overarching new sustainability law to bolster natural life-support systems and prevent economic and social collapse, according to proposals from one of the country’s most influential leftwing thinktanks.

The paper says policymakers have made a “catastrophic mistake” by underestimating the risks posed by environmental breakdown and the potential benefits of switching to a different economic approach that focuses on building abundance rather than running down resources.

Growers hosting lectures by academic who says Great Barrier Reef is ‘in great order’

Queensland sugarcane farmers – among the biggest polluters of the Great Barrier Reef catchment – have labelled the scientific consensus about the natural wonder as “unsubstantiated scaremongering”.

Their peak organisation, Canegrowers, says it is attempting to bring “balance” to scientific debate about the reef by hosting and promoting two lectures next month by the controversial academic Peter Ridd.

World’s biggest fund urged to invest in clean energy for good of the climate and its investors

BlackRock, the world’s biggest investor, has lost an estimated $90bn over the last decade by ignoring the serious financial risk of investing in fossil fuel companies, according to economists.

A report from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) has found that BlackRock has eroded the value of the $6.5tn fund by betting on oil companies that were falling in value and by missing out on growth in clean energy investments.

Bank of England governor says firms that ignore crisis ‘will go bankrupt without question’

Capitalism is “very much part of the solution” to tackling the climate crisis, according to the governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney.

Challenged in an interview by the Channel 4 News presenter Jon Snow over whether capitalism itself was fuelling the climate emergency, Carney gave a strident defence of the economic system predicated on private ownership and growth but said companies that ignored climate change would “go bankrupt without question”.

Godfrey Boyle, who has died aged 74, was founder-editor in 1972 of Undercurrents, a magazine of “radical science and people’s technology”, which inspired a variety of sustainable energy, housing, transport and community projects. In its founding year he led the editorial team of Undercurrents (known affectionately as Undies) to the first United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, where they distributed a special issue on energy and organised an exhibition on alternative technologies. The publication lasted 10 years before merging with Resurgence magazine.

In 1975 Godfrey co-edited (with Peter Harper) Radical Technology, a book with contributions from many of the Undies stable that was perhaps best known for the series of Visions drawings by the anarchist artist Clifford Harper. In the same year Godfrey published his influential book Living on the Sun, which advanced the then novel idea that industrial countries could make a transition to renewable power.

Sales of single-use bags by big supermarkets have fallen 90% since 5p charge introduced

Shoppers’ use of plastic carrier bags in England has continued to fall following the introduction of the 5p charge, according to new figures. Sales of single-use bags by all large retailers in 2018/2019 slumped by 37% to 1.11bn compared with the previous year.

Sales of plastic bags by the seven biggest supermarkets – Asda, Marks & Spencer, Morrisons, Sainsbury’s, The Co-operative Group, Tesco and Waitrose – have plummeted by 90% since the levy was introduced in October 2015.

Conservation and climate change policy ‘should be two sides of same coin’, says chair of Natural England

A new generation of national nature reserves are being created to help improve people’s health and mitigate the effects of climatic extremes, according to the chair of the government’s conservation watchdog.

The South London Downs reserve is the first in a series of landscapes that will be designated a national nature reserve this year, said Tony Juniper of Natural England. Several more will follow this autumn, including what he described as one “very significant” newly protected area.

Usage changes from describing outdoors to depicting digital life in just one generation

Tweet, web, stream and cloud may once have evoked the wild outdoors, but they are now predominantly used to describe technology, according to new linguistic research.

A study of datasets of informal conversations from different decades has found that the implied meaning of some common nature words in Britain has almost completely changed in a single generation.

‘Insidious’ health-related impacts in Australia and Pacific include lowered cognitive capacity and spread of diseases

Climate change is “absolutely” already causing deaths, according to a new report on the health impacts of the climate crisis, which also predicts climate-related stunting, malnutrition and lower IQ in children within the coming decades.

The report, From Townsville to Tuvalu, produced by Monash University in Melbourne, pulled together scientific research from roughly 120 peer-reviewed journal articles to paint a picture of the health-related impacts of the climate emergency in Australia and the Pacific region.

Nadi Bay declaration issues blunt warning: coral atoll nations could be uninhabitable as early as 2030

Pacific leaders have called on Australia to abandon plans to use carry-over credits to meet Paris climate targets and to immediately stop new coalmining, warning some of their countries could be uninhabitable as soon as 2030.

In a strongly worded statement issued at the end of a Pacific Islands development forum in Fiji, the leaders said they were deeply concerned about a lack of “comprehension, ambition or commitment” from developed nations despite the climate crisis posing grave consequences for their people.

The orthopaedic device was discovered inside 4.7m animal that died in central Queensland last month

An orthopaedic plate found in the stomach of a Queensland crocodile could possibly bring closure to the family of a missing person.

The plate, with six stainless steel screws, was inside the 4.7-metre MJ, who died a month ago after a fight with another large crocodile at Koorana Crocodile Farm near Rockhampton.

Calls for Mexico to crackdown on use of illegal fishing nets after further decline of species

There are fewer than 19 vaquita porpoises thought to be left, according to a study.

In 2016, estimates of the vaquita population stood at just 30, but research published in Royal Society Open Science suggests the figure has fallen further.

Rod Schoonover, who was an intelligence analyst for 10 years, said the Trump administration halted his report on global heating

A former senior government analyst has accused the Trump administration of “undercutting evidence” of the threat to national security from the climate crisis after his report on the issue was blocked by the White House.

Rod Schoonover, who worked as an intelligence analyst for the federal government for 10 years before resigning earlier this month, submitted a written testimony on the “wide-ranging implications” of global heating over the next 20 years, for submission to the House intelligence committee last month.

You may love the mini bottles of posh shampoos on your hotel stay, but 200m of them are dumped in landfill each year. There is a better way

The Blue Planet effect has swiped its keycard and entered the mainstream hospitality sector. In an effort to kick out avoidable single-use plastic by 2021, InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG) in the UK, will remove all small plastic toiletry bottles from its 843,000 rooms in 5,600 hotels.

If you’re a regular hotel guest, especially at low-cost chains, you may have already experienced the switch to those bulk dispensers and the multipurpose surfactants that promise to do multiple jobs: ie shampoo and condition.

Labour says fracking for gas will prevent Britain meeting carbon emissions target

Jeremy Corbyn has urged Boris Johnson to ban fracking for gas as research by Labour shows it will stop the UK meeting a net zero target for carbon emissions this century.

The analysis was published ahead of a visit by the Labour leader to join anti-fracking protesters at Cuadrilla’s Preston New Road site in Lancashire.

This iridescent beauty is back in Norfolk for the first time since the 70s – and marching north

Every July in the 1980s, my dad and I visited Foxley Wood, an ancient woodland close to my home. We were searching for the purple emperor, an iridescent purple, treetop-dwelling insect that inspires more obsession than any other butterfly.

Last seen in Norfolk in the early 70s, it fell extinct because Foxley, like many ancient woodlands, was turned over to conifers after the war. We hoped this notoriously elusive creature survived but, if it did, it always eluded us.