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New research looked at similar laws in Victoria and around the world. The Albanese government must learn from their successes and failures. Anita Foerster, Associate professor, Monash University Alice Bleby, PhD Candidate, UNSW Sydney Anne Kallies, Senior Lecturer, RMIT University Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.

The time has come to choose: do you trust the people in suits downplaying this emergency, or the activists lying in roads in an attempt to ward off catastrophe?

For the past year or so, I have been repeatedly listening to a critically acclaimed album, Ignorance, released in 2021 by the Canadian band the Weather Station. Its music is graceful, poised and smooth, but it is also an almost conceptual set of songs about the urgency of the climate crisis and the disorientation of living in a culture that still refuses to acknowledge it. According to its chief creator, the singer-songwriter and former actor Tamara Lindeman, many of its songs evoke what happens when “this veneer of ‘everything will be OK’ disappears”. That moment of revelation is perfectly captured in one song I have played over and over again – which is simply called Loss, and finds Lindeman recalling a conversation: “What was it last night she said? At some point you’d have to live as if the truth was true.”

Amid unprecedented temperatures, fires and the grim pantomime that will eventually end with the selection of our next prime minister, I suspect more people than ever would now understand those words as a matter of direct emotional experience. For millions of us, this summer’s heat is synonymous with an anxiety that is now impossible to shake off, and a renewed awareness of the small transgressions and outright hypocrisies that are required to get through each day. We perform them because of something that Lindeman’s lyrics consummately describe: that very human talent for just about averting our eyes from what is directly in front of us, so as to live a quiet life; and a political culture that just about keeps the “everything will be OK” veneer in place.

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Tiangong or Heavenly Palace is scheduled to be operational by the end of 2022.

Atlassian billionaire Scott Farquhar - business partner of Mike Cannon-Brookes - reportedly leading bid for listed solar and storage developer Genex Power.

The post Atlassian billionaire leads takeover bid for solar and storage developer Genex appeared first on RenewEconomy.

Surely last week’s inferno must focus Conservative minds on the one real issue, the climate crisis – mustn’t it?

“Dear Jim’ll. Please can you fix it for me to a) Go all upside down in a Typhoon plane like in Top Gun; b) Go in parliament drunk with my best friend Nadine and shout “boring” at the square politicians; c) Have a massive party with all food in a massive stately home for free; d) Give all my friends lordly old-sounding titles like in Game of Thrones; e) Get Winston Churchill’s autograph. I haven’t heard about any of the bad stuff relating to you by the way, so jog on! Yours Boris Piccaninny Watermelon Letterbox Wall-Spaff Deep-State Letterbox Johnson (58 years old).” Well done. Now go. Go. Can you just… Just go. Go. Don’t start playing the piano. There are your shoes. Have you got your water bottle? Go. Just go.

I believe it was I who wrote, in this column on 19 August 2018, before the Brexiter foreign secretary Boris Johnson was even prime minister, “Those in positions of power – journalists, fellow Conservative party members wondering how things will pan out, people biding their time on the divided opposition benches, trembling television presenters in search of ‘balanced arguments’ in the face of blatant lies and transparent manipulation – know what this incubus is and what it is doing, and how it is prepared to put our futures at risk to achieve it. And yet they do not hold Boris Piccaninny Watermelon Letterbox Johnson to account. They will not shrink Boris Piccaninny Watermelon Letterbox Johnson to snuff box size and sink him into the black lake of legend where he belongs. They will have to live with their failure. And, sadly, so will we.” Though I take no pleasure in having so conclusively predicted the chaos Johnson would ultimately unleash, I am happy to be paid twice for the same 117 words.

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Not everyone has the opportunity to roam the countryside. Meet the people trying to change that.

Tips about how to engage with people who think climate change is a "hoax".

‘This is just proof that every now and then, despite all the trauma and difficulties … some good stuff happens’

Barry Brown wanders out to the headlands of North Stradbroke Island every day with a camera in hand, hoping he’ll capture something special – like a whale spouting or a fur seal resting on a rock.

Last week, Brown was in his usual spot near Whale Rock, at the South Gorge walk on the island south-east of Brisbane, hunting for birds to photograph.

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More than 40 houses were destroyed by fires on Britain’s hottest day. Now there are calls for an urgent rethink on building safety laws

Fires that burned in several parts of the UK last week spread in the same way as those that led to the great fire of London and would have been far worse with stronger winds, a fire expert has said.

Fires in Wennington, Uxbridge and Erith destroyed 41 properties last Tuesday, when temperatures went above 40C to make it the hottest day on record in the UK, and fire services had their busiest day since the second world war.

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Sale calls into question protection deal signed at Cop26 as expert warns Congo auction could be a catastrophe for wildlife, health and climate

The Democratic Republic of the Congo has announced it will auction oil and gas permits in critically endangered gorilla habitat and the world’s largest tropical peatlands next week. The sale raises concerns about the credibility of a forest protection deal signed with the country by Boris Johnson at Cop26.

On Monday, hydrocarbons minister Didier Budimbu said the DRC was expanding an auction of oil exploration blocks to include two sites that overlap with Virunga national park, a Unesco world heritage site home to Earth’s last remaining mountain gorillas.

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With wildfires, railway tracks buckling and tarmac melting, it’s no longer possible to ignore how broken the world is

Back in late February 2020, in the days before the pandemic, I spent a morning in a taxi listening to the news and wondering what it meant to preserve a moment. There was the slow-motion sensation that life as we knew it might be coming to an end. Still, something whispered in me, experimental rather than fatalistic: you’d better remember it, just in case. So – here is the window-shaped patch of blue sky, here are the people walking along the pavement, here are the trees. All recorded deliberately, eyes wide. Here is your life as you know it, frozen in a single frame on a cold, bright February day – taken carelessly, recklessly, for granted.

Now we are experiencing another crossing over into a before and an after. Tipping points are subjective. People have different thresholds, different ways in which we bury our heads. It’s also easy to get used to things. It’s just a matter of a couple of degrees, after all. Any boiling frog would tell you the same. But the sheer physicality of a wall of heat – malevolent heat, city-stopping heat, deadly heat – is hard to disavow. Heat that has been unprecedented in my lifetime, and will become normal within my lifetime. It’s as good a point as any to accept that the unthinkable is now thinkable.

Sophie Mackintosh is an author. Her debut novel, The Water Cure, was longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker prize

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The giant Lovell radio telescope at Jodrell Bank is transformed into a space-themed light and sound show.

As puffin breeding season draws to a close, Drew Buckley shares his photos of the birds.

While planting rates have risen in Scotland, carbon capture figures overall have fallen every year since 2009, official data shows

The amount of carbon dioxide captured by the UK’s forests has fallen by millions of tonnes and will remain at historically low rates for over a decade, because of a failure to quickly replace old forest stocks.

Official data shows the amount of CO2 absorbed annually by trees in the UK peaked at just under 20m tonnes in 2009, but has fallen every year since. Millions of mature conifers have been felled but not replaced, reducing the carbon they capture and store.

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A daily summary of our news plus bite-sized updates from around the world.

Reporting to the Chief Executive Officer (CEO), this position will lead initiatives that build and strengthen communications, foster strategic partnerships, and enhance relationships with federal and provincial policymakers, industry leaders, and other stakeholders.

Aerial footage shows the swarm of jellyfish in the waters of Haifa Bay during the annual migration.

Thirty years ago, a bold plan was hatched to persuade people that climate change was not a problem.

Lawmakers in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa on Friday passed a bill to promote the sustainable growth and protection of the province’s forests.

EU carbon prices will recover to the €85-90 level in the next four weeks, an analyst has predicted, as the benchmark futures sank Friday to their lowest close since early March.