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Wildlife charities accused of trying to ‘upset people’ by urging members to condemn environment policies

Tory MPs have criticised the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), accusing it of using claims of a government attack on nature as a “marketing strategy”.

The bird charity, one of the UK’s oldest and most respected conservation organisations, has joined the country’s other largest environment NGOs, including the Wildlife Trusts and National Trust, to condemn mooted plans to create investment zones – which would weaken environment protections – and to get rid of the post-Brexit nature-friendly farming subsidy.

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Burgundy insect farm ramps up production to offer a meat-free future

In a box-like building on an out-of-town industrial estate in Burgundy, trays of Alphitobius diaperinus – otherwise known as the lesser mealworm – are being fattened up by robots then cooked, dried and turned into protein-rich powder and oil.

This is the headquarters of Ÿnsect a French company that is building the world’s largest insect farm, to open at the end of the year in preparation for what the French company believes will be a large increase in demand for a healthy alternative to meat.

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Time is running out to protect the RSPB and National Trust from climate crisis-denying, neoliberal lobbyists and their nature-hating Tory cronies

Perhaps the unelected 2022 Conservative government’s most surprising achievement has been to radicalise the the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. Flask-swiggers best known for shivering silently in freezing hides, usually they await the seasonal arrival of a particular kind of swan. But Kwasi Kwarteng’s kamikwasi budget has made landscape and wildlife collateral damage for his deregulated New Investment Zones, the Japanese knotweed of ultra-Conservative economic ideology, and the twitchers are twitching with rage.

“We are angry!” squawked the normally placid RSPB, in an urgent communique entitled Stop the Attack on Nature. “The UK government has launched an unprecedented attack on nature. They are threatening to tear up the laws that protect our best wildlife sites, weakening protections for nature in the planning system and may be about to scrap vital proposals that would help farmers help nature. We will not stand by and let this happen.” Take to the streets bird-fans. Riot! And remember, a tube of birdfeeder nuts squeezed into a tied-off sock can make a functional cosh, while a barn-style bird-table roof can be adapted into truncheon-resistant headgear. Twitchers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your choughs.

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Climate warnings have been around for decades. Guardian reporting on the issue dates back as far as 1890

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It reads like a summary of the year so far: drought in Europe, floods in Pakistan, and a high pressure system ‘stuck’ in the North Atlantic, disrupting normal weather patterns. And scientists blaming it all on climate change.

But the Guardian article in question was not published in 2022, but in 1978.

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To support its growth around the world, Tradewater is seeking a Program Manager to lead our greenhouse gas collection and destruction projects in Asia and the Pacific region. These projects typically involve finding and procuring old refrigerants at the end of their useful life, and building the systems and partnerships needed to have them safely destroyed according to published carbon offset protocols.

An extraordinary week has confirmed nearly all Australia's coal generators will be gone in little more than a decade. Here are the five big highlights.

The post Stunning week of early coal closures opens path to 100 pct renewables appeared first on RenewEconomy.

Climate breakdown is far more intense in 2022 than even many scientists expected, yet the world still isn’t treating this like a crisis

I became a climate activist 16 years ago. Back then, not many people cared about climate change. The eye rolls were audible. Media coverage was scarce, and what little there was glibly included “both sides”. It was frustrating and tragic to see such a clear and present danger and to know that it was still mostly avoidable, yet ignored by society.

I assumed that intensifying, in-your-face climate disasters would serve as a sort of backstop to finally force action. I even hoped that humanity would listen to scientists and start acting before things got that bad. I didn’t think this was too much to expect; after all, the scientific fundamentals are easy enough to grasp.

Peter Kalmus is a climate scientist and author of Being the Change: Live Well and Spark a Climate Revolution

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It’s becoming ever more likely that 100% renewable electricity in Australia’s electricity grid could be achieved by the end of the decade.

The post So long, Loy Yang: shutting Australia’s dirtiest coal plant a decade early won’t jeopardise our electricity supply appeared first on RenewEconomy.

Hydroponics unit can produce saplings six times faster than it takes to grow them naturally outdoors

It is a long way from the romance of a sun-dappled Highland glen. Picture instead a white cube equipped with the computer-controlled automation you would sooner expect to see in an Amazon or Ikea warehouse.

Scotland’s state forestry agency believes this prefabricated structure, erected at an agricultural research centre near Dundee, could play a significant part in its quest to help combat climate heating by greatly expanding the country’s forest cover.

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A German-headquartered energy and carbon trading platform, which has branded itself a “digital alternative” to traditional exchanges and brokers, has closed a Series B financing round with the support of oil major Chevron.

Ahead of the UN biodiversity conference, our reporter reflects on lessons of hope and change in three years reporting with the Guardian’s age of extinction team

Saying you’re a biodiversity reporter doesn’t mean much to a lot of people. “What do you actually write about?” they ask. And this is exactly why there should be more journalists on this beat. The nature crisis continues to fly under the radar.

In 1992, at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, there was a wave of enthusiasm about tackling the great environmental problems, and so governments set up three UN conventions to deal with climate change, biodiversity loss and desertification. Since then, the climate crisis has been treated as separate to the biodiversity crisis, yet there is huge overlap between the two.

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African Parks, of which the prince is president, is one of three parties accused of rushing a mass translocation of the mammals

Two wildlife organisations, including one headed by Prince Harry, have been accused of caring about animals more than people after three men died following an elephant translocation in Malawi.

In July, more than 250 elephants were moved from Liwonde national park in southern Malawi to the country’s second-largest protected area, Kasungu, in a three-way operation between Malawi’s national park service and the NGOs African Parks and the International Fund for Animal Welfare (Ifaw).

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Exclusive: Revelation comes after agency’s chair told MPs in May the practice had only recently come to light

The Environment Agency knew raw sewage was being illegally dumped into English rivers from wastewater treatment works a decade ago, a leaked report shows.

However, the agency’s chair told MPs in May that the practice had only recently come to light.

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British Gas has offset its energy production using hundreds of thousands of old carbon credits from a Chinese industrial gas project that have been banned in Europe due to their questionable environmental integrity.

Wildlife groups praised the move making it illegal to capture, kill, injure or disturb them.

Rural rough sleepers face harsh conditions as a taskforce warns of a hidden homelessness "crisis".

Emitters cut down their California Carbon Allowance (CCA) net length to end five straight weeks of growth, while financial players followed suit in both the WCI and RGGI markets, according to US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) data published Friday.

California's cap-and-trade programme grew to a record number of accounts in the third quarter amid interest from speculative and compliance entities, according to data published Friday.

In Brazil’s presidential elections that kick off this Sunday, pitting far-right incumbent Jair Bolsonaro against far-left former president and current front runner Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the country’s path forward on climate policy – including the fate of a carbon market – hangs in the balance.