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Leading global environmental lawyer James Thornton says President Trump will ultimately fail to wind back US environmental laws.

Solar accounted for 3.2% of total generation in Australia last year, and its big rise will continue to 30% by 2030 and more than 50% by 2050.

A reality check on some of the big claims made to justify the proposed new mine, which would be the biggest in Australia. From ‘tens of thousands of new jobs’ to ‘good for the environment’, we unpack several of the most common claims to see if they stand up to scrutiny
• The new coal frontier: Australia’s carbon bomb
• Indian solar power prices hit record low

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Leading economists, including Joseph Stiglitz and Nicholas Stern say taxes of $100 per metric ton could be needed by 2030

A group of leading economists warned on Monday that the world risked catastrophic global warming in just 13 years unless countries ramped up taxes on carbon emissions to as much as $100 (£77) per metric ton.

Experts including Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz and former World Bank chief economist Nicholas Stern said governments needed to move quickly to tackle polluting industries with a tax on carbon dioxide at $40-$80 per ton by 2020.

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European commission given more powers to monitor testing and fine firms after Germany’s initial objections are overcome

The European Union has moved towards cracking down on carmakers who cheat emissions tests by giving the EU executive more powers to monitor testing and impose fines.

The European council overcame initial objections from Germany and agreed to try to reform the system for approving vehicles in Europe in the wake of the Volkswagen emissions scandal.

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Under ‘rigs to reefs’ idea, oil firms asked to consider turning decommissioned platforms into artificial reefs for marine life

Conservationists want oil companies and regulators to consider leaving more old rigs in the North Sea rather than removing them, with the savings paid into a fund to protect sealife.

After the Brent Spar debacle in 1995 when Shell provoked public outrage with plans to sink an old storage buoy, international regulations were imposed that work on the presumption that operators will remove rigs. Exemptions can be granted but are rare and on limited grounds.

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Terry Selwood, 73, from New South Wales, Australia, describes the moment a great white shark launched itself into his boat while he was out fishing on Saturday afternoon. Speaking to Australia’s ABC News Selwood says the coastguard initially didn’t believe his story when he called them for help

• Fisherman says great white shark jumping in his boat was ‘just a mundane thing’

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Kabwe in Zambia has been left with extreme levels of lead pollution after almost a century of metal mining and smelting, harming generations of children

• Read more: The world’s most toxic town: the terrible legacy of Zambia’s lead mines

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Air pollution adds to the global burden of disease.

SA energy minister Tom Koutsantonis is still weighing up how much faith he can put into battery storage to manage the grid.

Adani Power's latest big loss underlines the fact that its Carmichael coal project makes no sense. One myth is that the local economy would be devastated if the mine doesn't go ahead. But it's simply not true, given the huge pipeline of solar, wind, storage, biofuel and battery manufacturing projects.

Studying the catastrophe that has been Australian climate and energy policy these past 30 years is a thoroughly depressing business. When you read great work by Guy Pearse, Clive Hamilton, Maria Taylor and Phillip Chubb, among others, you find yourself asking “why”?

Why were we so stupid, so unrelentingly shortsighted? Why did the revelation in 2004 that John Howard had called a meeting of big business to help him slow the growth of renewables elicit no more than a shrug? Why did policy-makers attack renewable energy so unrelentingly?

About now, readers will be rolling their eyes and saying either “follow the money, stupid!” or “they are blinded by their marketophilia”. Fair enough, and they have a point.

My recently published paper, titled “Wind beneath their contempt: why Australian policymakers oppose solar and wind energy” outlines the hostility to renewables from people like former treasurer Joe Hockey, who found the wind turbines around Canberra’s Lake George “utterly offensive”, and former prime minister Tony Abbott, who funded studies into the “potential health impacts” of wind farms.

It also deals with the policy-go-round that led to a drop in investment in renewables.

In a search for explanations for this, my paper looks at what we academics call “material factors”, such as party donations, post-career jobs, blame avoidance, diminished government capacity to act, and active disinformation by incumbents.

I then turn to ideological factors such as neoliberalism, the “growth at all costs” mindset, and of course climate denial.

Where it gets fun – and possibly controversial – is when I turn to psychological explanations such as what the sociologist Karl Mannheim called “the problem of generations”. This is best explained by a Douglas Adams quote:

Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

Over the past 50 years, white heterosexual middle-class males with engineering backgrounds have felt this pattern particularly keenly, as their world has shifted and changed around them. To quote my own research paper:

This loss of the promise of control over nature occurred – by coincidence – at the same time that the British empire disintegrated, and the US empire met its match in the jungles of Vietnam, and while feminism, civil rights and gay rights all sprang up. What scholars of the Anthropocene have come to call the “Great Acceleration” from the 1950s, was followed by the great (and still incomplete) democratisation of the 1960s and 1970s.

The rising popularity of solar panels represents a similar pattern of democratisation, and associated loss of control for those with a vested interest in conventional power generation, which would presumably be particularly threatening to those attracted to status, power and hierarchy.

Consider the cringe

Here are a couple more ideas and explanations that didn’t make the cut when I wrote the research paper. First up is the “biological cringe” – analogous to the “cultural cringe”, the self-loathing Australian assumption that all things British were better.

In Ecology and Empire: Environmental History of Settler Societies, the historian Tom Griffiths notes that:

Acclimatization societies systematically imported species that were regarded as useful, aesthetic or respectably wild to fill the perceived gaps in primitive Australian nature. This “biological cringe” was remarkably persistent and even informed twentieth-century preservation movements, when people came to feel that the remnants of the relic fauna, flora and peoples, genetically unable to fend for themselves, should be “saved”.

Second, and related, is the contempt and hatred that settler colonialists can feel towards wilderness, which in turn morphs into the ideology that there should be no limits on expansion and growth.

This means that people who speak of limits are inevitably attacked. One good example is Thomas Griffith Taylor (1880-1963), an Australian scientist who fell foul of the boosters who believed the country could and should support up to 500 million people.

Having seen his textbook banned in Western Australia for using the words “arid” and “desert”, Taylor set sail for the United States. At his farewell banquet at University of Sydney, he reinterpreted its motto Sidere mens eadem mutate (“The same spirit under a different sky”), as “Though the heavens fall I am of the same mind as my great-great-grandfather!”

I am anticipating that at least four groups will object to my speculations: (vulgar) Marxists, for whom everything is about profits; positivists and Popperians, who will mutter about a lack of disprovability; deniers of climate science, who often don’t like being described as such; and finally, those who argue that renewables cannot possibly provide the energy return on investment required to run a modern industrial economy (who may or may not be right – we are about to find out).

Reader, of whatever category, what do you think?

Australian consortium ready to choose site in Townsville for first Australian battery "gigafactory", signs deal to do same in New York.

The Meadows, Chester The brightest colours drew my novice eyes: a vivid yellow ladybird, a tiny blue weevil and the polished emerald of a dock beetle

A gentle breeze shimmers through the grass and the babble of the breeding season surrounds me. This patch of water meadows, just across the river Dee from the city centre, invites us to take things easy. But last time I visited I was carrying a petrol-powered leaf blower, helping Julie Rose of the Friends of the Meadows users group and entomologist Clive Washington with their beetle biodiversity survey.

Just off the path from Bottom Lane, Clive thrashed a blossoming hawthorn with a big stick, holding a white tray underneath to catch his quarry. A hand lens revealed common leaf weevils, Phyllobius pyri, rose-gold and speckled with pollen. A bronze bead was identified as Anaspis maculata, a tumbling flower beetle; a small longhorn beetle, Grammoptera ruficornis, stood out with its statement headwear and pewter sheen.

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Tesla has added Watergardens Town Centre to its network of fast charging stations.

There is a pair of jeans for every occasion. Krisana Antharith/Shutterstock

Denim jeans – whether ripped, straight, flared, vintage or raw – are one of the world’s most-loved garments. But from fibre to wardrobe, they have a considerable ecological footprint.

Given the diversity of cotton growing enterprises and clothing producers around the world, tracking the environmental impact of a pair of cotton jeans is no simple feat.

But as a denim-wearer you can make more sustainable choices by buying responsibly, extending your jeans’ life with gentle washing and choosing to repair, not replace.

In this guide we’re looking at the key stages of jeans’ life cycle: cotton cultivation; spinning and dyeing; manufacturing, distribution and retailing; and what happens after you get them home.

Cotton cultivation

Let’s begin with the cotton crop, in which water and pesticide use are prominent environmental issues.

Cotton is a thirsty crop, using 3% of the world’s irrigation water on 2.2% of global arable land. However, better management can reduce water wastage and improve efficiency.

Like humans, insects and bugs are attracted to the pillowy white fluff that is actually the fruit of cotton. Traditional cotton farming is chemically intensive, but genetically altered cotton varieties and innovations in integrated pest management have almost halved insecticide use (from 25% to 14% of global insecticide sales) since the 1990s.

Organic cotton crops use no synthetic chemicals, but yields are typically lower than that of conventional cotton, and organic cotton represents less than 1% of the 25 million tonnes of cotton grown globally. Its water consumption is similar to non-organic cotton.

However, organic producers in developing countries can charge a premium for their crops and aren’t reliant on synthetic insecticides and pesticides. If you want to buy organic cotton jeans, you can check for brands accredited by the Global Organic Textile Standard.

To improve cotton cultivation standards globally, the not-for-profit organisation Better Cotton Initiative was established in 2005 to promote more sustainable cotton growing, with better practices across water use, land and pest management and social indicators. Major fashion retailers like Levis Strauss & Co., H&M, The Gap, Kathmandu and Burberry are focusing on sourcing Better Cotton, organic, or recycled cotton for their clothing.

Spinning, dyeing and manufacturing

The process of spinning fibre into yarn, yarn into cloth, and manufacturing cloth into clothes represents some 70% of the total energy consumption of creating a pair of jeans.

The iconic indigo colour and the broken-in look of denim are the result of chemically intensive and high water use treatment processes that can take a toll on workers’ health and safety and impact the environment.

Leading denim brands are actively promoting techniques that limit the chemical and water intensity of wet processing, like enzyme finishing, laser etching and ozone treatments.

Initiatives such as Zero Discharge of Hazardous Waste work across the apparel supply chain to tackle this problem. You can check their website for a list of brands that have committed to better practises.

Denim manufacturing is chemically intensive. Moreno Soppelsa/Shutterstock Wearing jeans

It may come as a surprise, but a large part of the environmental impact of a pair of jeans occurs after you buy them – how you launder and care for your jeans, and for how long, can be crucial in minimising denim’s ecological footprint. Throw-away fashion is a huge problem: a survey of 1,500 British women found the majority of garments (not just jeans) are worn as few as seven times.

You can minimise your jeans’ footprint simply by washing and drying them less often. We often launder far more often than needed, and overwashing may be more from habit than actual dirtiness of garments. In a 2012 study, participants wore the same pair of jeans unwashed for three months with no ill effects. Any smells or stains were simply managed through airing or spot cleaning.

Jeans have a patina of use that factories work hard to simulate – but you can develop your own patina through wear over a lifetime.

Forward-looking denim brands are embracing longevity, with Nudie jeans offering repair services, and Levi Strauss promoting durability and a personal connection to one’s clothing.

New business models promote a circular approach to consumption: you can rent your jeans from Mud denim, and at the end of your jeans’ life, Mud will collect them for reuse or recycling.

Easy steps for buying greener

If buying new, purchase from retailers actively sourcing responsibly grown cotton. Check for standards and certifications like Better Cotton or the Global Organic Textile Standard.

Look for retailers that promote environmentally friendly processes, such as enzyme-washed denim or waterless denim. You can dig into your denim retailer’s sustainability statements on their website to see if they have signed up to initiatives to tackle hazardous chemicals, such as Zero Discharge of Hazardous Waste, or if they have their own scheme in place.

Remember that the most sustainable pair of jeans is the pair you already own. Care for your jeans by laundering them lightly and less often, using a cold wash cycle and line drying. Freshen them up between washes by hanging them in the sun or in a steamy bathroom.

Most importantly, extend their life by repairing them if damaged, and give them that patina of use through wear.

Alice Payne receives research funding from the Cotton Research Development Corporation (CRDC).

Susannah Kate Devitt receives research funding from the Cotton Research Development Corporation (CRDC).

Renewable energy futures prices are in free-fall, reflecting the general view that the 2020 target can be met, and may even be exceeded.

Carnegie Clean Enegry completes design of a wave energy integrated hybrid power station for the Mauritian island of Rodrigues.

Solar PV production in Germany averaged at greater than 30GW for an hour on Sunday, amounting to 42% of total power production at that time.

Three in four Australians understand that climate warming poses a “catastrophic risk,” even as the Australian government turns a blind eye.