The Guardian

‘Tight correlation’ between premium rises and counties deemed most at risk from climate crisis, experts say

Concern over the climate crisis may evaporate in the White House from January, but its financial costs are now starkly apparent to Americans in the form of soaring home insurance premiums – with those in the riskiest areas for floods, storms and wildfires suffering the steepest rises of all.

A mounting toll of severe hurricanes, floods, fires and other extreme events has caused average premiums to leap since 2020, with parts of the US most prone to disasters bearing the brunt. A climate crisis is starting to stir an insurance crisis.

New liquefied natural gas projects could produce 10 gigatonnes of emissions by the end of the decade, close to the annual emissions of all coal plants

A $200bn wave of new gas projects could lead to a “climate bomb” equivalent to releasing the annual emissions of all the world’s operating coal power plants, according to a report.

Large banks have invested $213bn into plans to build terminals that export and import gas that is chilled and shipped on ocean tankers. But a report has warned that they could be more damaging than coal power.

US says current climate rules are satisfactory, prompting condemnation from activists and vulnerable countries

Climate justice campaigners have condemned the US after the world’s largest historic greenhouse gas emitter argued against countries being legally obliged to combat the climate crisis.

The US intervention came on Wednesday as part of the historic climate hearing at the international court of justice (ICJ) in The Hague, where island nations and other climate-vulnerable countries are calling for wealthy polluting nations most responsible for climate breakdown to be held legally responsible.

Mary Lawlor criticizes US’s failure to respond to concerns after Alex Connon and John Mark Rozendaal charges

A leading UN human rights expert has expressed dismay after the US government failed to respond to questions about the criminal crackdown on peaceful climate protesters.

Mary Lawlor, the UN special rapporteur on human rights defenders, on Tuesday published a letter sent to US authorities raising concerns about the potential violation of international human rights law after two climate activists, Alex Connon and John Mark Rozendaal, were charged with crimes that carried lengthy jail terms.

Carrboro officials say Duke Energy broke state laws waging decades-long ‘deception campaign’ about fossil fuels

A small North Carolina town has launched the nation’s first-ever climate accountability lawsuit against an electric utility.

The litigation, filed by officials from Carrboro, North Carolina, on Wednesday morning, accuses Duke Energy of waging a “deception campaign” to obscure the climate dangers of fossil fuels. Those efforts resulted in delayed action to curb planet-heating pollution, which has pushed up the costs of climate action today, the lawsuit says.

EDF extends life of reactors to ‘boost energy security’ and bridge gap before new Somerset project starts up

Four of Britain’s oldest nuclear power plants will continue running for more than a decade longer than initially planned to help bridge a gap before the delayed Hinkley Point nuclear station starts up.

The owner of Britain’s nuclear plants, the French energy company EDF, said it had agreed to extend the lifetime of its reactors yet again to “boost energy security and reduce dependence on imported gas”.

Exclusive: With Brazil’s politicians, agribusiness organisations and global traders piling on the pressure, the highly successful 2006 Soy Moratorium is under threat

One of the cornerstones of Amazon rainforest protection – the Soy Moratorium – is under unprecedented pressure from Brazilian agribusiness organisations, politicians, and global trading companies, the Guardian has learned.

Soy is one of the most widely grown crops in Brazil, and posed a huge deforestation threat to the Amazon rainforest until stakeholders voluntarily agreed to impose a moratorium and no longer source it from the region in 2006.

Downgrading species’ protection status for political gain puts decades of conservation efforts at risk, says WWF

Europe’s wolves will lose their “strict protection” status, alarming conservationists who fear for the survival of an animal brought back from the brink of local extinction.

A committee charged with saving wildlife took the wolf’s protection status down a notch on Tuesday after members voted through a proposal from the European Union that lowers the bar for shooting a wolf.

The Baku Cop29 talks were marked by division and self-interest, with rancorous meddling right until the end

• Fiona Harvey is an environment editor at the Guardian

When I first visited Azerbaijan this spring, one fixture of the Baku skyline was unmissable. The bright orange of flaring – the product of the oil and gas extraction that makes up 90% of Azerbaijan’s export revenues – lit up the night sky, not far from the Olympic stadium, where nearly 200 nations would gather in November for the Cop29 climate summit.

Flaring burns methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, and is a major source of carbon emissions. If all the world’s flared gas were captured instead, it could power sub-Saharan Africa. But that entails installing new equipment, so producers don’t bother.

Fiona Harvey is an environment editor at the Guardian

Survey finds 25 percentage point gender gap across all age brackets on whether nuclear power would be positive for the country, with majority of men saying it would

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New data points to a stark gender split in attitudes towards nuclear energy, with women much more likely to say they don’t support it or think the risks are too great.

Research company DemosAu surveyed 6,000 people on behalf of the Australian Conservation Foundation and found 26% of women thought nuclear energy would be good for Australia, compared with 51% of men.

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Exclusive: Campaigners say company’s apparent abandoning of 2030 pledge is a ‘masterclass in greenwashing’

Coca-Cola has been accused of quietly abandoning a pledge to achieve a 25% reusable packaging target by 2030 in what campaigners call a “masterclass in greenwashing”.

The company has been previously found by researchers to be among the world’s most polluting brands when it comes to plastic waste.

Numbers of red and grey squirrels rising, survey finds, but more greys are present in last remaining red strongholds

Campaigners are concerned about the rising presence of grey squirrels in England’s last remaining strongholds of reds.

An annual distribution survey of about 250 sites in woodlands and gardens across northern England shows that occupancy figures for red and grey squirrels are increasing – but they are rising more steeply for greys.

Vanuatu leads the charge of several nations arguing developed nations have a legal responsibility beyond non-binding promises

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Australia has been accused of undermining its Pacific neighbours in a landmark international legal case after it argued that high-emitting countries are not obliged to act on the climate crisis beyond their non-binding commitments to the 2015 Paris agreement.

In the case before the UN’s international court of justice (ICJ), Vanuatu is leading an argument brought by several Pacific nations and developing states – including Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu – that developed countries have a legal responsibility beyond existing UN frameworks. The case does not specify the names of countries that would fall under the definition of high emitters.

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New GCSE was announced under previous government in 2022 but now ‘sitting in limbo’, says Mary Colwell, one of its architects

The natural history GCSE has been shelved because it is “seen as a Conservative party initiative”, one of the architects of the proposed new qualification has said.

The conservationist and campaigner Mary Colwell told the Guardian she was “hugely frustrated” with the halt to the proposed new GCSE, which had been announced in 2022 and was supposed to be taught in schools by 2025.

Paul Watson, an early Greenpeace member, says his imprisonment in Greenland is a ‘political case’

The anti-whaling activist Paul Watson will learn within 14 days whether he will be extradited to Japan, a court has been told, as his four-month imprisonment in Greenland was extended.

At a hearing in Nuuk on Monday, the capital of the autonomous territory of Denmark, the judge Lars-Christian Sinkbæk said that Watson, who turned 74 today, would continue to be detained in a high security prison pending a decision from the Danish government. Watson’s legal team immediately submitted an appeal to Greenland’s high court.

The word ‘probably’ will haunt this fish for the rest of its days – a deflating description for a cute, toxic creature

Pufferfish are cute, and most pufferfish are toxic. Like people, they spend their weeks moving between states of puffed up and deflated. Or, really, three states: normal, puffed up and then the hangover after the puffing up. Ironically, the pufferfish toxin, called tetrodotoxin, is deadly because it stops a person’s diaphragm from moving – in other words, it stops you from being able to puff yourself up. And you could see that as a lesson for wanting to eat them in the first place.

You’re wondering what is inside a blown-up pufferfish, how they inflate. Firstly: it is not air, or else they would pop up and out of the water like a balloon in a swimming pool. Also, air is hard to come by down there. They turn themselves into absurd-looking spherical objects by sucking water – something called, grossly, “buccal pumping” – into their extremely elastic stomachs. They don’t have ribs, which helps. This gives predators a fright – but perhaps more to the point, large spheres are hard to swallow.

Readers are led to believe a short-on-facts advertorial exhorting government to let companies extract more gas is straight news coverage

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The big news on Monday morning was that the story splashed across the front of News Corp’s biggest-selling tabloid newspapers wasn’t news at all. It was an advertorial paid for by a fossil fuel industry. Not that readers glancing at page one of the Daily Telegraph, Herald Sun, Courier-Mail or Adelaide Advertiser were let in on this secret.

Instead, they were sold a lie – that the story was straight news coverage, in some cases described as an “exclusive” or a “special report”, on how (in the words of the Courier-Mail) Australia must “step on the gas” as it was the “only way to avoid higher bills, blackouts”.

Authorities accused of ‘wasting time in court’ rather than working to fix the problem in towns across the Northern Territory

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Lawyers for Aboriginal residents of a remote town in the Northern Territory say it is “shocking and disappointing” that the NT government is trying to overturn a landmark court ruling which found it was legally required to provide them safe drinking water.

The challenge is the latest development in a five-year legal stoush between the NT government and residents of Laramba, an Aboriginal community 205km north-west of Alice Springs, who took the government to court over elevated levels of uranium in their drinking water.

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Researchers at ANU found no real difference between the climate opinions of regional and urban Australians. Remember that as we head into the next federal election, with renewable energy on the front line

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I have many heritages: Chinese, Irish, Anglo and Japanese among them. I am a journalist. I grew up in the city but have lived in the country for 30 years. How should I define my identity?

Rural life has colonised my writing life. But I would hazard a guess I am not fully accepted as rural in many circles. I am certainly not the mythical bush person of legend.

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Ahead of rally and public hearings, community organiser says ‘risky scheme’ is being pushed for region with no details or consultation

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Community, environment and health groups will rally together against the Coalition’s nuclear proposal for the Latrobe Valley in Traralgon, as public hearings for a nuclear inquiry take place in town on Tuesday.

Adrian Cosgriff, a member of community advocacy group Voices of the Valley who worked in Gippsland’s oil and gas industry before retiring, said the region needed a decent plan for jobs as its coal-fired power stations shut down.

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