The Guardian

It is one thing to U-turn on a modest green transition programme. It is another to do so using mendacious Tory economic paradigms

Rarely has a lacklustre policy been abandoned for a reason so bad that it threatens to inflict long-term damage on a society. Independently of whether the £28bn green investment programme was the right policy for the next Labour government to commit to, Rachel Reeves’s reasons for ditching it were an undeserved gift to the Tories and a partial vindication of their disgraceful flirtations with an austerian, anti-green political narrative.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today shortly after her U-turn on Labour’s headline £28bn green transition programme, the shadow chancellor explained her decision by claiming that, under Jeremy Hunt, the Treasury is “planning on maxing out the credit card”, adding for good effect that the Tories are “maxing out the headroom ahead of the next general election” thus limiting “what an incoming Labour government will be able to achieve”. By comparing the state’s coffers to an overladen credit card, Reeves endorsed an insidious fallacy.

Angry farmers, worried tourism workers and unprepared politicians – Catalonia is on the frontline of a drought-stricken future

Walking through Barcelona these days, you can’t miss the signs and billboards picturing a red plastic bucket and the message “Water doesn’t fall from the sky” (l’aigua no cau del cel in Catalan). The ads are part of a campaign to get people to save water. Since the beginning of February, Barcelona and 200 other towns in Catalonia have been in an official drought emergency. That means more than 6 million people in the region live with restrictions. Daily water usage per inhabitant is limited. Parks are unwatered, fountains are dry and showers at swimming pools and beaches are closed. Farmers can’t irrigate most of their crops and must halve their water usage for livestock or face fines.

It’s not just Catalonia. The European Drought Observatory’s map of current droughts in Europe shows the entire Spanish Mediterranean coast in bad shape, with red areas indicating an alert similar to those in north Africa and Sicily. Catalonia may be going through the worst drought on record for the area, but the southern region of Andalucía has faced continuous drought since 2016. Last year, Spain’s droughts ranked among the 10 most costly climate disasters in the world, according to a report by Christian Aid.

María Ramírez is a journalist and deputy managing editor of elDiario.es, a news outlet in Spain

Denialism highest in central and southern US, with Republican voters less likely to believe in climate science

Nearly 15% of Americans don’t believe climate change is real, a new study out of the University of Michigan reveals – shedding light on the highly polarized attitude toward global warming.

Additionally, denialism is highest in the central and southern US, with Republican voters found less likely to believe in climate science.

The current wave of protests endangers environmental progress. But imaginative politics can get the green deal back on track

Another day, another tractor blockade. Earlier this week, all economic activity at the Belgian port of Antwerp ground to a halt as hundreds of farmers prevented access to freight. In Spain, tractors blocked motorways near Seville and Granada, and in Catalonia. As a rolling wave of rural discontent has made itself felt across Europe since the start of the year, only four EU member states have remained unaffected.

Numerically, farmers account for only 4% of Europe’s working population. But as Europe’s political leaders are belatedly coming to realise, the burgeoning crisis has outsize implications. A perfect storm of factors – including rising energy costs, competition from lightly regulated foreign imports and supermarket profit-gouging – have driven angry farmers off the land and on to the streets of capitals. But in disputes that touch on some of the faultlines of contemporary culture wars, there is a growing danger that the EU’s green deal takes the rap for a crisis incubated elsewhere.

‘We need to respond now,’ says author of study that says crucial forest has already passed safe boundary and needs restoration

Up to half of the Amazon rainforest could hit a tipping point by 2050 as a result of water stress, land clearance and climate disruption, a study has shown.

The paper, which is the most comprehensive to date in its analysis of the compounding impacts of local human activity and the global climate crisis, warned that the forest had already passed a safe boundary and urged remedial action to restore degraded areas and improve the resilience of the ecosystem.

Scientist behind hybrid carbohydrate praises its ‘pleasant and novel flavour experience’

Bowls of decidedly pink-tinged rice are about to feature on sustainable food menus, according to researchers who created rice grains with beef and cow fat cells grown inside them.

Scientists made the experimental food by covering traditional rice grains in fish gelatin and seeding them with skeletal muscle and fat stem cells which were then grown in the laboratory.

Even as the weather emergency was still unfolding, some commentators and politicians couldn’t resist the urge to blame renewable energy

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More than half a million electricity customers were without power in Victoria on Tuesday after storms swept across the state, downing power lines and transmission towers.

But as workers and system managers scrambled to get power back online, some commentators and Coalition MPs were unable to resist the urge to somehow blame renewable energy.

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Republican Jeff Landry, who has labeled climate change ‘a hoax’, has elevated fossil fuel executives to key environmental posts

In his first four weeks in office, Louisiana’s Republican governor, Jeff Landry, has filled the ranks of state environmental posts with executives tied to the oil, gas and coal industries.

Landry, who has labeled climate change “a hoax”, has also taken aim at the state’s climate taskforce for possible elimination as part of a sweeping reorganization of Louisiana’s environmental bureaucracy. The goal, according to Landry’s executive order, is to “create a better prospective business climate”.

PM2.5 from heating homes using solid fuel such as wood increased by 19% from 2021 to 2022, data shows

A rise in harmful emissions from wood-burning stoves has cancelled out decreases in particulate pollution from road and energy sources in the UK, government data reveals.

Emissions of PM2.5 from domestic combustion – heating homes using solid fuel such as wood – increased by 19% between 2021 and 2022, counteracting efforts made to travel and produce commercial energy in less polluting ways.

On an oceanic quest in the southern hemisphere, our writer encounters the only albatross species endemic to Australia

As one seabird enthusiast once proclaimed: “Real birds eat fish.” That was certainly true of the species I was hoping to encounter on my first oceanic quest in the southern hemisphere.

A dozen of us boarded the first Sydney Pelagics trip of the year, chugging out of the famous harbour early one January morning. We soon left the silver gulls and crested terns behind, before coming across the first of a quintet of shearwaters: wedge-tailed, short-tailed, flesh-footed, Hutton’s and a single streaked, a scarce visitor from Japan.

The Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) has successfully translocated 21 eastern black rhinos to a region where they have been extinct for 50 years. Here’s how they caught, transported and released these critically endangered 1,400kg creatures to their new home

• Just two northern white rhinos remain. The species’ first IVF pregnancy could save them from extinction

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A landslide in Turkey's eastern Erzincan region has buried a goldmine, and authorities say at least nine workers at the site are missing. Footage circulating on social media captured the moment a torrent of muddy earth burst into a valley near the mine in the İliç district. Turkey's interior minister, Ali Yerlikaya, said 400 people from the country's emergency agency, AFAD, had been dispatched to the mine to rescue the trapped workers

Campaigners accuse government of ‘back door’ amendment to bring in pollution rule change that was defeated in Lords

The government is facing a legal challenge over plans to permit housebuilders in England to allow sewage pollution “through the back door”.

The campaign group Wild Justice, along with the law firm Leigh Day, have submitted plans for a judicial review over what they term an “unlawful attempt to use guidance to introduce a change that was defeated in the House of Lords last year”.

Farmers across Europe demand higher prices and looser environmental rules

A tractor blockade has seriously disrupted operations at the Belgian port of Antwerp, Europe’s second largest, authorities said, as angry farmers continued their protests in half a dozen European countries.

“No freight can be delivered or picked up, as trucks are halted, while employees are only being allowed in after a long wait,” said Stephan Vanfraechem, the director of the association of port operators Alfaport.

Green New Deal Rising aiming to help create climate caucus in parliament by promoting candidates in marginal seats

Young climate activists are discreetly trying to influence Labour’s candidate selection process in six constituencies before the general election, in an effort to form a climate caucus that can sway the next parliament.

Outlining its electoral strategy at a press event on Monday night, Green New Deal Rising (GNDR), a youth climate campaign, said it intended to mobilise thousands of young activists to promote eight general election candidates in marginal seats.

Report by RSPB and British Trust for Ornithology finds H5N1 has killed three-quarters of great skua and 25% of northern gannets

The UK has lost more than three-quarters of its great skuas on surveyed sites since bird flu struck, according to the first report quantifying the impact of H5N1 on seabird populations.

The deaths have happened over two years, since the outbreak of H5N1 in 2021. The UK is internationally important for seabirds, home to most of the world’s 16,000 pairs of nesting great skuas.

Government plans to deliver SMRs ‘lack clarity’ say environmental committee, and will likely fail to meet clean-energy goal of 2035

MPs have warned that a planned fleet of small nuclear reactors are unlikely to contribute to hitting a key target in decarbonising Britain’s electricity generation, as the government opened talks to buy a site in Wales for a new power station.

The Environmental Audit Committee (EAC) said that ministers’ approach to developing factory-built nuclear power plants “lacks clarity” and their role in hitting a goal of moving the grid to clean energy by 2035 was unclear.

Scientists say global heating is driving ice loss and warmer water, as ice cover falls short of 50-year average of 18%

The average ice cover over the five Great Lakes was just 6% last month, placing it among the least icy Januarys since records began 50 years ago, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa).

The Great Lakes – Superior, Huron, Michigan, Erie and Ontario – are located at or near the US-Canada border, and are connected by a network of smaller lakes and rivers that span a combined surface area of 95,000 sq miles, making it the largest freshwater system in the world.

Investor-State Dispute Settlements are legal, huge and often hush-hush – and fossil fuel firms and others are using them to hold the planet to ransom

• How a US mining firm sued Mexico for billions – for trying to protect its own seabed

What do you get if you cross the planet’s richest 1%, a global legal system adapted to their investment whims, and the chance to squeeze billions from governments? The answer is “Investor-State Dispute Settlements”, or ISDS, alternatively dubbed “litigation terrorism” by Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel prize-winning economist. ISDS is a corporate tribunal system, where a panel of unelected lawyers decides whether a company is owed compensation if the actions of national governments leave its assets “stranded”.

In hearings, which are often held behind closed doors, ISDS documents, claims, awards, settlements – even the content of cases – need not be made public, regardless of any public-interest considerations.