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Volvo Cars has been in the news recently in relation to their announcement this Wednesday on their decision to leave the internal combustion engine only based automotive industry.

A 1MW plant on the site of half-built nuclear power plant in Tennessee is a harbinger of things to come in the US and global electricity mixes.

Originally published in the Manchester Guardian on 12 July 1917

Along the grassy cuttings of the railway line between Carlisle and Kilmarnock the midsummer flowers are rampant. One would like to have a free pass to investigate the flora of railway cuttings. Many are the tales one hears of the uncommon plants which turn up in such situations, but, in whirling past, one can get only an impressionist view. To-day the prevailing colour was a brilliant and beautiful lilac-blue, that of the tufted vetch (Vicia cracca) whose long-spikes of pea-shaped flowers made “little heavens” for many miles. In some places they had begun to mow the grass along the cuttings, and the farmers will be glad of this vetch, which makes a much-prized sweet food for cattle.

Related: How to access the Guardian and Observer digital archive

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The June heatwave brought dangerously high ozone levels and caused serious summer smog

The hottest June day in the UK since 1976 caused widespread summertime smog across southern England and the Midlands. Sevenoaks in Kent and Lullington Heath, East Sussex, measured the greatest ozone level for 11 years; reaching eight on the UK government’s ten-point scale for the first time. The winds then turned westerly and carried our polluted air eastwards to create problems over Germany.

Ozone can take days to form in the atmosphere. It therefore spreads across very wide areas. To reduce the worst impacts, Paris once again banned the oldest vehicles from its roads and, in a targeted approach, restrictions were placed on industries that emit volatile hydrocarbons that contribute to ozone formation. In a re-run of the 2003 heatwave, smoke from the tragic forest fires in Portugal spread over France and reached the UK during the hot weather.

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What if you had somewhere quick and easy to put food waste, instead of being blamed for wasting it? Gary Perkin/Shutterstock

Environmental campaigns often appeal to our emotions: they ask us to care. They implore us to feel a sense of connection, empathy and stewardship, and then to alter our behaviour as a result.

In relation to food waste, this could mean anything from not pouring oil down the sink so as to protect ocean habitats, to keeping methane-emitting organic waste out of landfill.

About one-third of the world’s food goes to waste. We know that this squander is bad for social, economic and environmental reasons, yet still it happens.

But my recent research (publication pending) which looks at how food surplus is managed in homes, found that in many households, food wastage is not due to people being unthinking, unskilled or uncaring over-consumers. Instead, it is a product of our (largely reasonable) hierarchies of care: we actively prioritise the health and well-being of our family and friends.

For example, leftovers may go to waste because of health concerns about freezing and reheating certain foods, or the need to eat them within particular time frames. Many parents with young children (in line with parenting and dietary advice) want to give their kids a wide variety of fresh, nutritious food. This means not feeding them the limp veggies lurking at the bottom of the crisper, and avoiding meat that may have crept past its use-by date.

As well as feeling a strong obligation to their family’s immediate concerns, many people I survey and interview are frustrated by a lack of appropriate infrastructure to help keep food waste out of landfill. As a consequence, campaigns that focus on mobilising people to “care more” about the environment may actually be preventing – or at least limiting – the focus on more urgent problems.

Blame game

The implication that waste results from a lack of care reinforces a neoliberal approach that blames consumers. This is evident in the most well-known food waste reduction campaign, Love Food Hate Waste (LFHW), which originated in Britain and has been imported to New South Wales and Victoria.

The NSW LFHW website implores us to care for food, in turn promising that we can “waste less food, save money and our environment”. The suggested strategies include meal planning and leftover recipes. These could be useful for some people, but many consumers are already using these techniques. They know how to reuse food and consciously attempt to avoid overbuying.

In the few research studies that have looked in detail at the passage of food into and out of homes, all found that householders carefully monitor and manage fresh foods. Generally speaking, people aren’t adding organic waste to landfill through a lack of care for the environment.

Many of my participants said they want to reduce waste but find it difficult to buy small amounts of fresh food from supermarkets, where such products are often pre-packaged. Many people were also concerned about over-packaged items, such as half a cauliflower wrapped in huge lengths of cling wrap.

Food enters the waste stream not because we don’t care, but because we actively prioritise other things such as our family’s health, and because of authorities’ failure to provide infrastructure to address the problem.

A failure of infrastructure

While care for the environment is rarely front and centre in people’s decision-making about food waste (being secondary to health considerations), my research suggests that people will happily use schemes to keep food waste out of landfill, as long as they are simple, efficient, and mess-free.

Such schemes could include regular collection of the waste by local councils, including provision of receptacles that fit into kitchens and minimise mess and smell through the use of biodegradable bags (as used in a recent successful trial by Lake Macquarie Council).

Community composting initiatives, commonly centred around community gardens, also have potential, as does the use of private companies, particularly for servicing businesses. In my work with households involved in some of these initiatives, all were enthusiastic about having their food waste being repurposed into compost to nourish new life.

But most urban Australian households either can’t or won’t compost at home, and this is unlikely to change no matter how much we urge the public to care for the environment.

This illustrates why focusing solely on making people “care” is unlikely to reduce household food waste as much as we would like. Instead, we must reduce food waste in landfill by providing infrastructure that drives widespread behavioural change. Put simply, we need to expand our toolkit.

Many people already care about food waste, but they care about other things too, such as health and hygiene. By giving consumers a simple way to deal with food waste rather than throwing it into the bin, we can reduce landfill without asking people for unrealistic compromises about their food habits. To really drive behavioural change, perhaps what we need to promote is not care but the infrastructure that makes caring convenient.

Access to participants in the Lake Macquarie trial was facilitated by Lake Macquarie City Council. The author did not receive funding from this body.

Surinder Arora publishes ‘cheaper and less disruptive’ plan to expand airport including shifting new runway away from M25 and reducing site area by 25%

A wealthy hotel operator has submitted plans for a third runway at Heathrow which he claims would be £6.7bn cheaper than the airport’s current scheme.

Surinder Arora, founder and chairman of the Arora Group, said there were “cheaper and better ways” to expand Britain’s biggest airport in proposals sent to the government as part of a public consultation.

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Terese Pagh eating a banana flavoured eXo Protein bar made out of cricket powder. provded by The Gateway Bug

I’ve had the privilege of getting a sneak preview of a movie called The Gateway Bug, which is a documentary about feeding humanity in an uncertain age. It will be shown in Melbourne next weekend as part of the Melbourne Documentary Film Festival.

I wrote that eating insects is a good idea back in 2013, shortly after the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) released a report suggesting that using insects for food and feed would increase food security for our planet.

Following the publication of that article, I was contacted by people who wanted to know how to start farming insects. They were looking for people to contact, for information on regulations. I was invariably unhelpful. I didn’t know the answers, and felt inadequate, but now I know that nobody knew the answers back then. We were at the very beginning of a journey.

The Gateway Bug is a documentary about that journey, following the nascent industry in North America producing insects for human consumption. Insects provide an alternative to our current food systems that use too much water, too much land, produce mountains of organic waste and create vast clouds of greenhouse gases.

Film makers Johanna B. Kelly (director) and Cameron Marshad (cinematographer and editor) began making the film in 2015 at the first meeting of the American Edible Insect Coalition in Detroit. By interviewing 50 professionals in this new industry, the film makers have claim that they can convert viewers into activists.

The film begins with a rush of frightening statistics about the dangers surrounding the future of food, made entertaining by their choice of music: Pollution by Tom Lehrer. Within the first 10 minutes they have brought the audience up to speed on the problem with our food systems. They spend the next hour and a quarter listening to the people who are working on potential solutions and providing detail about the challenges they face.

Surprisingly, convincing people to understand the potential health benefits and to like the taste of insects does not seem to be one of those challenges. There are no signs of disgust on the faces of people eating insects for the first time, who say they taste like chips or popcorn. A protein powder made from crickets is said to be “nutty with a hint of shrimp”. When crickets were offered as a topping on gourmet hot dogs in Youngstown Ohio, the restaurant struggled to keep up with demand.

No, the challenges were logistic rather than ideological. Cricket farms must find feed that does not compromise the taste of their product. Grinding the grain to a powder fine enough for baby crickets and caring for thousands of charges at a time is labour intensive. Sadly, one business goes under when millions of crickets die off due to contaminated town water.

What I found deeply surprising was the diversity of viewpoints of the people involved. One California business, which started by growing crickets on spent mash from a nearby brewery, gave up when it became apparent that their product could not be used as fish feed in the aquaculture industry.

Tyler Isaac, co-founder of Slightly Nutty, closed his business in 2016 because, “..we did not want to feed rich millennials cricket powder”. For him, the main problem is the unsustainable food system and unless he was changing that, he did not feel like he was making a difference.

Other companies are all about finding ways to get Americans to eat crickets: as protein bars (eXo), in chocolate bars (Chapul), or as chips quaintly renamed Chirps (Six foods). Also concerned about climate change, the lack of water resources, and food systems, the people that run these companies are nevertheless content to use their products as a gateway to using bugs in everyday foods.

I loved the way the film makers used old footage to express certain attitudes toward food and insects. It cleverly sent the message that although the words sounded perfectly reasonable, these ideas are already part of our past. The graphics were simple and useful, expressing concepts in a way the viewer didn’t have to work too hard to understand.

The Gateway Bug is really a discussion of food and how critical it is to our future on this planet. That may sound somewhat trite, but this film makes you sit down and think seriously about where our food comes from and where it will come from in a more crowded future earth.

Before seeing this movie, I didn’t even know that “entomophagist” was a word, but as an advocate of entomophagy, I suppose I am one. I was surprised and moved by this documentary, which did not pull any punches but also did not preach or condescend. But beware, after watching it, you are probably going to want to eat some bugs.

The Gateway Bug will be screened at Cinema Nova, Melbourne on 16 July 2017 at 3 pm. Buy tickets here

Conservationists fear negative impact on ecosystem and call on the government to release cull data

It is one of the more neglected dimensions of the badger cull, but one that could reignite the controversy surrounding the attempt to control the spread of bovine tuberculosis.

Conservationists have long claimed that eliminating badgers from certain areas is likely to trigger an increase in other predators, such as foxes, leading to serious consequences for species and habitats. But the government has refused to publish data showing what impact the cull is having on local ecosystems for fear that the results will be used by animal rights activists to identify the farmers and landowners carrying out the extermination.

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German chancellor Angela Merkel speaks to the press at the end of the G20 summit in Hamburg on Saturday and addresses the clear split between the positions of the US and the remaining 19 nations over climate change in the summit’s joint statement notes

• G20 leaders’ statement on climate change highlights rift with US

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A final communiqué seems to be almost agreed, but with one outstanding issue - climate change.

Carcasses found off Canada in recent weeks in what may be biggest single die-off of one of world’s most endangered whale species, expert says

Seven North Atlantic right whales have been found floating lifelessly in the Gulf of St Lawrence, off Canada, in recent weeks, in what is being described as a “catastrophic” blow to one of the world’s most endangered whales.

The first whale carcass was reported in early June. Within a month, another six reports came in, leaving marine biologists in the region reeling.

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More battery-powered vehicles would mean cleaner air and quieter streets – but also a drain on the National Grid and less fuel duty to the Treasury

Streets will be quieter, the air will be cleaner, people will spend less time at petrol stations and car factories might even return to Britain’s shores if the country switches to electric cars in a dramatic, widespread fashion.

But widespread adoption of battery-powered vehicles would not be without challenges too. A large-scale switchover to electric cars could create problems for power grids, could mean roads lined with charging poles and it could also leave a big hole in public coffers as fuel duty dries up.

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Kendal, Lake District Every year they fly 5,000 miles to breed in the exact same crack or crevice in the exact same building

In their brief sojourn here, swifts wreak high-pitched havoc – they are all daredevil velocity and sassy sociability. Since Roman times at least, these urban Apodidae have exploited humankind’s structures. They are nest site faithful, returning every year to breed in the exact same crack or crevice in the exact same building after their 5,000-mile migration from Africa.

But according to the RSPB, over a third of the UK’s swifts have been lost in 22 years, in no small part because of habitat loss. Re-roofing or re-pointing old stone buildings can unwittingly lock swifts out; they may return from their long-haul trip to find their homes boarded up and, for that season at least, breeding will not take place.

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Lord Howe Island is the nesting site for hundreds of thousands of providence petrels (Pterodroma solandri). The birds used to be common on Norfolk Island, but were eaten to extinction by starving convicts in the early days of settlement. Although fast and graceful in flight, providence petrels spend most of their lives at sea and are clumsy on land. They also have no fear of humans. If they hear a call they will land and investigate, making them easy prey for a hungry convict

• Birds, sweat and fears on Lord Howe Island’s grand Seven Peaks Walk

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The VP made a tongue-in-cheek apology to Nasa after a photo of him touching the equipment went viral.

The UN has adopted a landmark treaty prohibiting nuclear weapons, described as "a historic event for humanity".

Plastic seems inescapable but there are easy ways like quitting junk food, carrying your own cutlery and using up leftovers that will make a difference

By now, we all know the horrors of plastic. The way it hangs around without biodegrading for centuries, the way it’s clogging the stomachs of birds, how it creates islands in the ocean for marine life to get stuck in, how it pollutes our riverways and motorways as non-biodegradable rubbish.

Yet it’s everywhere. If you want a takeaway coffee, there’s plastic lining in about 99% of disposable cups. If you want a sandwich at a deli, it’s more than likely going to be wrapped in plastic. Even when you’re doing your very best to be healthy, a two litre milk comes in a plastic container and most major supermarkets produce is wrapped or bagged in plastic.

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Experts say hedgehogs face crisis in towns and countryside, as RSPB records fewer sightings of the animals for third year in a row

During the day they curl up in nests of shredded paper but when night falls those that are well enough scurry and snuffle around the old fish boxes that serve as their temporary homes.

These hedgehogs at the RSPCA’s West Hatch animal centre in Somerset have had a tough time of it. Some have tangled with dogs, strimmers, bonfires, fruit netting or vehicles; others have been brought in as tiny unseeing hoglets, having lost their parents.

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Environment adviser to Labour who headed Greenpeace for five years but later broke with many of its positions

The environmentalist Stephen Tindale, who has died aged 54, was an influential backroom figure in the Labour party who became executive director of Greenpeace UK. His brand of environmentalism was driven by his socialist principles. He was international in outlook, pragmatic about what could be achieved politically, and technologically optimistic. He was successful as a leader, first in government and then outside it.

Heading Greenpeace from 2001 until 2006 was Stephen’s most public-facing role, at a time when the organisation was at its noisiest. In 2005 he was arrested during direct action at Range Rover’s SUV plant in Solihull. Greenpeace planted a flag subverting the company’s logo and proclaiming “Land Rover: Climate Criminals”. Stephen was proud of this act of civil disobedience and a framed image of his arrest adorned his wall.

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The week’s top environment news stories and green events. If you are not already receiving this roundup, sign up here to get the briefing delivered to your inbox

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