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The need to tackle London’s toxic air | Letters
It is of real concern to read that nearly 95% of London’s population live in areas exceeding WHO limits for particulate matter (Report, 5 October). Inner London’s location, its dense road network and high buildings mean that it suffers from poorer air quality than many parts of the country. We are assisting the mayor of London by developing a low emission neighbourhood, leading a London-wide clampdown on idling engines, and banning diesel from our own fleet. We have created a City Air App, which gives low pollution travel routes to over 20,000 Londoners and use our planning powers to ensure new buildings are energy efficient and low emission.
This is having a positive effect and we welcome the mayor’s decision that from 1 January 2018 all newly registered taxis are zero-emissions capable. But more needs to be done. We want to see existing diesel private hire vehicles removed from fleets as soon as possible to protect the public from exposure to toxic diesel emissions – with current licences phased out by 2020.
Jeremy Simons
Chairman of the environment committee, City of London Corporation
Why British scientists are watching Iceland's volcanoes
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...Can we make fashion greener?
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...Siberian blue robin excites bird watchers in Orkney
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...Liberal MP Craig Kelly defends Abbott climate speech
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...Despite the charged atmosphere, Frydenberg and Finkel have the same goal for electricity
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...Policy will be a mess until Turnbull sacrifices Coalition’s climate goat
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...SA Libs promise $100m for home battery subsidy scheme
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