The Guardian
Fightback begins over Trump's 'illegal and irresponsible' clean power repeal
- NY attorney general to sue administration for scrapping Clean Power Plan
- Major companies including Apple and Google support Obama-era initiative
The US is set for a fresh battle over climate change after the Trump administration moved to tear up the country’s primary policy to lower emissions and stave off dangerous global warming.
Related: 'The war on coal is over': EPA boss to roll back Obama's clean power rules
Continue reading...Tony Abbott dares us to reject evidence on climate, but reveals a coward | Graham Readfearn
The former Australian prime minister’s misleading speech to a London thinktank was full of climate denial mythology
Tony Abbott titled his London speech on climate change “Daring to Doubt” – a challenge, if you will, to reject mountains of evidence and instead lick your fingers and shove them into the plug socket of denial.
Go on, I dare you.
Continue reading...Woman, 79, supplying tea to anti-fracking protesters forcibly removed by police
Jackie Brookes, who had been providing refreshments at Kirby Misperton camp for past month, accuses officers of bullying
A 79-year-old woman who set up a tea and cake stall at the site of an anti-fracking protest in North Yorkshire has been forcibly removed by police.
Related: Slinging mud: inside (and outside) the UK's biggest fracking site
Continue reading...Tony de Brum obituary
To live on one of the Pacific atolls is to come face to face with climate change on a daily basis. Few people in the world had such personal experience as Tony de Brum of the realities of sea level rises and storm surges, of warmer seas, receding beaches and abandoned land. Fewer still have been able to turn that experience into international action to save the islands, and the rest of the planet with them.
De Brum, who has died aged 72, acted as ambassador on climate change for the Marshall Islands, a sparsely populated group of more than 1,000 tiny islands spread out over nearly 30 coral atolls. In 2015, he was instrumental in securing the Paris agreement on climate change, by which the world’s governments collectively agreed, for the first time, to hold global warming to no more than 2C above pre-industrial levels, which scientists say is the limit of safety, and with an aspiration to ensure warming does not exceed 1.5C.
Continue reading...Coffee shops not doing enough to combat huge increase in wasted cups
Just 1% of the 2.5bn disposable cups thrown away each year in the UK are recycled, committee of MPs is told
Coffee shops are not doing enough to deal with the billions of disposable cups that are thrown away in the UK each year, an influential committee of MPs has been told.
Continue reading...Ineos compelled to disclose document it used to justify fracking protest injunction
Petrochemical company backs down after earlier refusal to the Guardian’s request to hand over the legal document
A multinational firm has backed down and disclosed a legal document that it used to justify a controversial sweeping injunction against anti-fracking protesters.
Ineos, which aspires to become one of the UK’s major frackers, had refused to disclose the document after it had been requested by the Guardian under open justice guidelines. However the petrochemical giant has reversed its stance and handed it over to the newspaper.
Continue reading...Fukushima residents win 500m yen payout over nuclear disaster
Court rules that Japanese government could have done more to prevent meltdown at plant caused by tsunami
A court in Japan has ordered the government and the operator of the wrecked Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant to pay 500m yen (£3.37m) in damages to residents affected by the March 2011 triple meltdown.
The ruling by the Fukushima district court follows an earlier decision that also found the government accountable for the disaster, in which large quantities of radiation was released and tens of thousands of people were forced to flee their homes.
Continue reading...Mine to maker: the journey of the world's first Fairtrade African gold – in pictures
Photographer Ian Berry takes us from Uganda’s makeshift goldmines to a London jeweller’s, documenting how a Fairtrade programme is helping to end the exploitation, mercury poisoning and treacherous conditions faced by Africa’s small-scale miners
Continue reading...Into the ice: humans get closer to nature – in pictures
From log trails to lava houses, from mud baths to melting glaciers, US photographer Lucas Foglia explores our relationship with the natural world. In his new book Human Nature, he has captured off-grid families, climate scientists at work, and a hotel over-run with greenery
Continue reading...Sadiq Khan must do more to tackle London's air pollution, say health experts
Mayor must do more to reduce car use and promote public transport, walking and cycling, says report
London mayor Sadiq Khan has been urged to do more to tackle the capital’s air pollution crisis by leading health experts and academics.
In a new report published on Tuesday, the group, including the chair of the NHS Sir Malcolm Grant, said the mayor must go further to reduce car use across the capital and harness new technology to create a system based around “public transport, walking and cycling”.
Continue reading...Lusius malfoyi wasp: New Zealand insect named after Harry Potter villain
Entomologist names parasitoid wasp after ‘redeemed’ character Lucius Malfoy in hope of showing not all wasps are bad
A Harry Potter fan turned entomologist has named a wasp after a redeemed villain in the series in the hope of drawing attention to the much maligned insect.
Tom Saunders named and described a New Zealand parasitoid wasp as part of his masters study at Auckland University.
Continue reading...Country diary: dark trees guard even darker mysteries
Chanctonbury Ring, West Sussex Jackdaws, ravens and hobbies dance in the sky, oblivious to tales of fairies and ghosts and ritual sacrifice
The morning sun shines through the canopy of the wood at the bottom of the hill, making the fallen leaves on the ground glow rust-red. The steep chalk and grey mud track is greasy from last night’s rain. Either side, flocks of tits – blue, great, coal and long-tailed – flit about, and wrens heckle my laboured climb with loud alarm calls.
At the top of the hill, the strong, cold wind is shaking the trees, some already stripped skeletal-bare. Emerging into the open, I turn on to the South Downs Way and follow the path through a gate, over a cattle grid. The soft contour of the hilltop sweeps up to the early iron age fort, hidden by a cap of dark trees.
Continue reading...Scientists hope damage to Larsen C ice shelf will reveal ecosystems
British Antarctic Survey researchers will study area opened up by loss of iceberg A68, which has been hidden for up to 120,000 years
A team of scientists is planning an expedition to examine the marine ecosystem revealed when an enormous iceberg broke off the Larsen C ice shelf earlier this year.
In July, the iceberg known as A68 broke off the shelf, leaving the area at its lowest recorded extent. Researchers are now hoping the event may lead to novel revelations from their investigations of the area opened up, which had been hidden under ice for up to 120,000 years.
Continue reading...Ben & Jerry’s to launch glyphosate-free ice-cream after tests find traces of weedkiller
Exclusive: Company pledges products will be free from ingredients tainted with controversial herbicide after survey found traces in its European ice-creams
Ben & Jerry’s has moved to cut all glyphosate-tainted ingredients from its production chain and introduce an “organic dairy” line next year, after a new survey found widespread traces of the controversial substance in its European ice-creams.
The dramatic initiative follows a new survey by Health Research Institute (HRI) laboratories which found traces of the weedkiller in 13 out of 14 B&J tubs sampled in the UK, France, Germany and the Netherlands.
EPA chief says administration to roll back Obama's clean power plan
- Scott Pruitt says he will sign rule withdrawing policy on Tuesday
- Plan imposed restrictions on emissions from coal-fired power stations
The Environmental Protection Agency administrator, Scott Pruitt, confirmed on Monday that the Trump administration will abandon the Obama-era clean power plan aimed at reducing global warming.
Related: Trump EPA plan will roll back Obama standards on power plant emissions
Continue reading...Secrecy around air pollution controls in cars faces legal challenge
New EU rules that allow car firms to keep their emissions control systems secret from the public risk another dieselgate and should be made illegal, say environmental lawyers
New EU rules that allow car manufacturers to keep pollution control systems secret from the public should be declared illegal, according to environmental lawyers.
The systems can legally cut emissions controls under certain conditions on the road, meaning more pollution is produced. But keeping these strategies secret risks another “dieselgate” scandal, according to ClientEarth lawyers, who announced on Monday that they are seeking to challenge the regulation in the European Union’s court of justice.
Continue reading...Mega-battery plant to come online in Sheffield
Facility run by E.ON, to be followed by many more, will help UK grid cope with fast-growing amount of renewable energy
One of the first of a new fleet of industrial-scale battery plants will come online in Sheffield this week to help the grid cope with the rapidly-growing amount of renewable power.
E.ON said the facility, which is next to an existing power plant and has the equivalent capacity of half a million phone batteries, marked a milestone in its efforts to develop storage for power from wind farms, nuclear reactors and gas power stations.
Continue reading...Trump’s plan to bail out failing fossil fuels with taxpayer subsidies is perverse | Dana Nuccitelli
Coal can no longer compete in the free market, so the Trump administration wants to prop it up with taxpayer subsidies
The conservative philosophy of allowing an unregulated free market to operate unfettered often seems to fall by the wayside when the Republican Party’s industry allies are failing to compete in the marketplace. Trump’s Energy Secretary Rick Perry recently provided a stark example of this philosophical flexibility when he proposed to effectively pull the failing coal industry out of the marketplace and instead prop it up with taxpayer-funded subsidies.
Continue reading...The Secret Life of Cows by Rosamund Young – review
This meditative little book isn’t new: it came out first in 2003, when it was published by a small farming press. But then a beady-eyed editor at Faber noticed Alan Bennett had praised it in his diary (“it alters the way one looks at the world”, he wrote in an entry on 24 August 2006), with the result that it has now been republished. Its author, Rosamund Young, who lives and works at Kite’s Nest, an organic farm on the edge of the Cotswold escarpment, must be thrilled – or maybe not. Having read her book, which is very sensible but also somewhat dreamy and a bit obsessive, she strikes me as the kind of woman who would rather be standing in a muddy field in her wellies than listening to some eager townie praise her for her wisdom.
Young’s parents began farming in 1953, when she was 12 days old and her brother (with whom she and her husband still run Kite’s Nest) was nearly three; she continues their tradition of treating animals as individuals with varied personalities, rather than as identical members of herds. The Secret Life of Cows, then, is essentially a collection of anecdotes about the many beasts she has hand-reared down the years: bovines, mostly, though there are a few stories about sheep and chickens, too. In a way, it’s like a book for children. Every animal has a name – Araminta, Black Hat, Dorothy – not to mention parents, brothers and sisters. Most have adventures, albeit not massively exciting ones; Young refers casually to their “conversations”, as if cows chat just like humans. After a while, though, you get used to all this, and as a consequence the world does indeed tilt. Or bits of it, at least. This book will change forever the way you see a field of ayrshires or friesians.
Continue reading...'Simply stunning': your favourite cycle rides around the world
Our readers on their most cherished cycling routes, from remote Scottish islands to Japanese mountain ranges