The Guardian

Cycling UK is raising funds to replicate nationwide a West Midlands police initiative that teaches drivers how to overtake cyclists safely

More than 2 million Britons cycle every day, and about 6.6 million ride at least once a month. For most of these people, the cycling infrastructure will be poor and they will be on the road mixing with traffic in all its forms where close passes will sadly be the norm.

According to findings from Dr Rachel Aldred’s Near Miss project, drivers overtaking cyclists too closely account for a third of threatening encounters that cyclists have with motor vehicles.

The insect’s abdomen pulsed – with a sudden flexing of its armour-like plates it was readying itself to fly, feed and pollinate

Winter winds had worked their way into the sills and splits in a wooden gate. Silver birch seeds and seed cases had been blown and wedged into every gap. Many more had been whisked through the bars into the lee of the west wind only to snag in spiders’ webs, and there they hung, in the grubby threads that had become necklaces of detritus.

Related: When is a wasp not a wasp? When it's a hoverfly

Malcolm Turnbull says he wants to take ideology out of energy but he shows every sign of another manufactured political fight

If you’ve watched the inglorious spectacle of the failure of Australian politics on climate and energy policy over the last 10 years, it’s a bit hard to look out on the wreckage without feeling sick to the stomach.

But look we must and, if we look now, we are able to chart the consequences of abject failure in highly specific ways.

Surge in October last year helped greenhouse gas emissions fall by 3.57m tonnes in December quarter

A sharp drop in Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions at the end of last year came courtesy of a spike in renewable energy generation in a single month, according to a new study.

Australia’s emissions fell by 3.57m tonnes in the three months to December, putting them back on track to meet quarterly commitments made in Paris after a blowout the previous quarter.

Australian Energy Market Operator predicts shortfalls in New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia ‘if we do nothing’

The Australian Energy Market Operator has warned that Australia is facing energy shortages if governments do not carry out national planning as exports continue to dominate the country’s gas supply.

The Aemo report predicts New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia will be impacted from the summer of 2018-19 and warns that the tightening of the domestic gas market will have flow-on effects to the electricity sector unless there is an increase in gas supplies and development.

Renewables now the cheapest source of reliable power generation in Australia, RepuTex says

“Clean” coal technologies won’t be commercially viable before 2030 without government subsidy and are fundamentally out of sync with the move towards more flexible power generation, according to the energy market analysis firm RepuTex.

In a new analysis released on Thursday, RepuTex argues that the rising price of gas, coupled with the falling cost of energy storage, has now made renewable energy the cheapest source of reliable power generation in Australia.

Chairman says cost of inaction on climate change is clear and issue shouldn’t be used to fight ‘political and ideological battles’

The Climate Institute will shut its doors after 12 years of providing independent advocacy and research towards climate change solutions, citing lack of funding.

Australia’s first non-government organisation focused solely on climate change has a reputation for independence but its chairman, Mark Wootton, used its closure to take a parting shot at “some in government” who have used the environment as a proxy for ideological battles.

Britain’s wildlife crime head says urgent security checks are needed to protect 111 rhinos in UK after attack near Paris

Police are visiting every zoo and wildlife park in the UK that houses rhinos to offer security advice after poachers shot dead a white rhinoceros and sawed off its horn at a French zoo.

The head of Britain’s National Wildlife Crime Unit (NWCU) said the French attack, the first of its kind in a European facility, was a wake-up call, and urgent security checks needed to be made to protect the 111 rhinos in captivity in the UK.

Around the world courts are stepping in when politicians fail to act, with South Africa’s government the latest to lose a groundbreaking climate lawsuit with judges ruling against its plans for a new coal-fired power station

The South African government has lost the country’s first climate change lawsuit after the hight court ruled against its plans for a coal-fired power station, the latest in a rising tide of international climate litigation.

Environmental NGO EarthLife Africa challenged the government’s approval of the proposed Thabametsi coal-fired power station on the grounds that it should have been preceded by an evaluation of its climate change impacts. The North Gauteng high court agreed and ordered the government to reconsider its approval, taking into account a full climate change impact assessment.

Cycle schemes have stagnated for 10 months, writes the former cycling commissioner. Will new cycling delegate Will Norman get London up to speed?

Under its first two mayors, London became important for the whole country as a leader in cycling. But Will Norman, Sadiq Khan’s new walking and cycling commissioner, starts work with the capital’s cyclists in a gloomy mood. Not just because of the deaths of three cyclists – and two pedestrians – in a single week last month, but because of the last 10 months’ stagnation in what was previously Britain’s most active programme to promote the bike.

I ran that programme for Khan’s predecessor, Boris Johnson, so perhaps I’m biased. But the figures aren’t biased. Over eight years, cycling increased by 53%. Not bad: but on the new central London segregated superhighways, which we opened in May, we saw the same percentage rise in six months.

New polling study also shows support for financial penalties for nations that refuse to be part of Paris climate deal, as Donald Trump has threatened

The citizens of four major European countries think the impacts of climate change such as severe floods and storms are already affecting them, according to a major new polling study.

The research dispels the idea that global warming is widely seen as a future problem, and also shows strong support for action to tackle global warming, including subsidies for clean energy and big financial penalties for nations that refuse to be part of the international climate deal signed in Paris in 2015 – as US president Donald Trump has threatened. There was also strong support for giving financial aid to developing nations to cope with the impacts of climate change.

Wenlock Edge Since the 1960s the great tit population has doubled. These dapper but tough birds are becoming a global power

Great tits will take over the world. You see my problem already – it’s the name. Unless you can disassociate from the Carry On innuendo of “tit”, this bird is always going to be a joke. It supposedly gets its name from titmouse: in Old English, tit means small and “mouse” is a corruption of māse, a bird name of Germanic origins.

There is a theatrical prettiness about great tits: the shiny black head with flashing white cheeks, flamboyantly dapper, green-backed, yellow-breasted, with black tie and cleavage stripe. Their twin-syllabic song sounds like a drunk pushing a rusty wheelbarrow. But the music hall stage persona ends there.

Patrick Barkham’s remarks on garden decking and wildlife loss (Notebook, 7 March) chime with research we undertook on the changes to garden vegetation in London over an eight-year period. We found that between 1998-99 and 2006-07, 3,000 hectares of vegetation disappeared from gardens, replaced by hard standing and decking. This loss, equivalent to 2.5 Hyde Parks each year, was compounded by the loss of 1m trees from gardens.  This period of change coincided with Ground Force’s time on television. Whether or not decking is now the culprit in gardens it once was, there’s evidence that artificial lawns – largely made from fossil fuels – are becoming the “new black”, again to the detriment of wildlife and the city’s ability to adapt to climate change.
Mathew Frith
Director of Conservation, London Wildlife Trust

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Move needed to drive orderly transition to low-emissions power sources, Investor Group on Climate Change says

The Turnbull government needs to put a price on carbon to unlock new investment in the electricity sector and drive an orderly transition to low-emissions power sources, according to the Investor Group on Climate Change.

The group, which represents major institutional investors in Australia and New Zealand, has used its submission to the Finkel review to argue that the government’s oft-repeated concerns about network reliability, energy affordability and emissions reductions will be addressed if concrete steps are taken to unlock new investment.

UK leads Europe for solar growth despite drop in installations after government cut subsidies

The amount of solar power added worldwide soared by some 50% last year because of a sun rush in the US and China, new figures show.

New solar photovoltaic capacity installed in 2016 reached more than 76 gigawatts, a dramatic increase on the 50GW installed the year before. China and the US led the surge, with both countries almost doubling the amount of solar they added in 2015, according to data compiled by Europe’s solar power trade body.

Report warns of catastrophic consequences and blames manufacturers for ‘systematic denial of harms’ and ‘aggressive, unethical marketing tactics’

The idea that pesticides are essential to feed a fast-growing global population is a myth, according to UN food and pollution experts.

A new report, being presented to the UN human rights council on Wednesday, is severely critical of the global corporations that manufacture pesticides, accusing them of the “systematic denial of harms”, “aggressive, unethical marketing tactics” and heavy lobbying of governments which has “obstructed reforms and paralysed global pesticide restrictions”.

Claxton, Norfolk Wigeon boil up from the pools and the white lines across the males’ wings flash in the grey waves of their panic

I am in heaven in recent days. Buckenham marshes, across the river, is a mosaic of temporary splashes and mud-edged pools and, from the Yare’s raised bank, I can see how it’s smothered in late-winter pre-migration waders and wildfowl. All the flocking thousands are in turn the trigger for the presence of harriers and peregrines.

While the former circle continuously over the marsh, swinging and twisting in cold air, the peregrines are no more than ghosts, spooking the others into wild free-ranging chaos. However, I did have one extraordinary sighting: on the evening of the new moon, a male and female peregrine spearing in tandem towards the southern horizon. Both closed their wings into a long stoop and they fell across the sky until I could see them only as two unequal-sized drops of mercury, pulled by gravity into an ellipse.

Main problem afflicting country’s grid is the lack of clear policy direction from Canberra, witnesses tell Senate inquiry

Senior executives from AGL Energy have given evidence that the main issue causing problems with reliable energy supply in South Australia is “dysfunction” in the gas market – not too many windfarms making the grid unreliable.

Executives from AGL told a Senate inquiry in Melbourne on Tuesday they would like to build a new gas-fired power station in South Australia to increase base load capacity in the state, but gas supply was chronically unreliable in the eastern states.

Exclusive: State of the Environment report says heritage and economic activity are being affected and the disadvantaged will be worst hit

Josh Frydenberg: bright spots, but much more to do

An independent review of the state of Australia’s environment has found the impacts of climate change are increasing and some of the changes could be irreversible.

The latest State of the Environment report, a scientific snapshot across nine areas released by the federal government every five years, says climate change is altering the structure and function of natural ecosystems in Australia, and is affecting heritage, economic activity and human wellbeing.

Please don’t give people an excuse for not making every effort to change behaviours that contribute to air pollution (Omega-3 supplements could guard against air pollution, 4 March). Millions of car drivers can cut air pollution right now by reducing their car use. Driving a car is antisocial in the extreme: it negatively impacts on thousands of lives and there are few places (if any) to escape the toxic waste that car drivers (their cars couldn’t do it without them) spew out from the moment they turn the key in the ignition to the moment they turn it off. One of the most troubling aspects of the human intellect is our ability to rationalise and reason away the most irrational and unreasonable and destructive behaviours. Car drivers are brilliant at it.
Jo Whateley
Sheffield

• It appears that may be true for mice and may yet prove to be so for humans. However, bearing in mind that around a quarter of all car journeys are for less than one mile and that car engines are significantly more polluting when the engine is cold, wouldn’t it be more immediately effective and expedient if far more people simply left their cars behind and walked?
Bill White
Leeds