The Guardian

Fifteen teams will get $1m to develop ideas, with a $50m prize awaiting the winner

The Tesla co-founder Elon Musk has offered a $100m (£73m) fund for inventions that remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere or oceans.

Musk, who has built up an estimated $203bn fortune, said he wanted scientists to make a “truly meaningful impact” and achieve “carbon negativity, not neutrality”.

A koala crossing one of South Australia’s busiest freeways led to a six-car collision as drivers abandoned their vehicles to mount a rescue of the 'calm' marsupial.

Nadia Tugwell  joined those trying to help the animal on Adelaide’s South Eastern Freeway near Crafers on Monday morning. 'When it saw me it instantly turned around to run backwards but the other lady was there and so we jumped it, bundled it up, and it ended up in my car because she had children,' Tugwell said.

While she waited for a koala centre rescuer to arrive, the animal made itself at home in her car. The volunteer released the uninjured koala back into the wild 1km from the freeway

Rice’s whales already considered endangered by the US with a population estimated at fewer than 100

Genetic analysis and a close examination of the skulls from a group of baleen whales in the north-eastern Gulf of Mexico have revealed that they are a new species.

“I was surprised that there could be an unrecognized species of whale out there, especially in our backyard,” says Lynsey Wilcox, a geneticist with the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who helped uncover the new species. “I never imagined I would be describing a new species in my career, so it is a very exciting discovery.”

Researchers use drones to map 30,000 sq metres of Heron Island at high resolution so sea cucumbers can be counted

“In the wee hours of the morning … we weren’t too excited to be spooning poo,” reef ecologist Dr Vincent Raulot says.

But that’s exactly what he and a team of researchers did to calculate out how much poop was excreted by an estimated 3 million sea cucumbers on the 20 sq km Heron Island coral reef in Queensland.

Swedish environmental groups warn test flight could be first step towards the adoption of a potentially “dangerous, unpredictable, and unmanageable” technology

A proposed scientific balloon flight in northern Sweden has attracted opposition from environmental groups over fears it could lead to the use of solar geoengineering to cool the Earth and combat the climate crisis by mimicking the effect of a large volcanic eruption.

In June, a team of Harvard scientists is planning to launch a high-altitude balloon from Kiruna in Lapland to test whether it can carry equipment for a future small-scale experiment on radiation-reflecting particles in the Earth’s atmosphere.

Sorry no weirdly denialist LOSERS allowed

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Engineers explore using gentle slopes rather than steep dams or mountains to store electricity

Hundreds of hills across the UK could be transformed into renewable energy “batteries” through a pioneering hydropower system embedded underground.

A team of engineers have developed a system that adapts one of the oldest forms of energy storage, hydropower, to store and release electricity from gentle slopes rather than requiring steep dam walls and mountains.

Australia is way behind on vehicle electrification, but there are solutions to help us catch up

Angus Taylor, the minister for emissions reduction, isn’t a stranger to dodgy numbers (just ask Clover Moore), and his latest work, the Future Fuels Strategy, demonstrates his disdain for actually lowering emissions.

The strategy paper misleadingly claims that hybrid vehicles are cleaner than electric vehicles by looking at just the years 2021-25. EVs bought now will enjoy cleaner power with every solar panel and wind turbine connected to the grid. Over a 10-to-15-year life, EVs have notably lower emissions than hybrids, and that’s ignoring the fact that many EV owners charge with solar and all the major fast charge operators use 100% renewable energy – local energy, instead of imported oil.

Covid has battered the industry, and the race for renewables is speeding up. We are at a tipping point

The final months of 2020 were a tough end to a tough year, according to BP’s chief executive. But Bernard Looney’s verdict on the worst financial year in the industry’s history is a devastating understatement. It was a period marked by thousands of job cuts, battered dividend policies and record multibillion-dollar losses.

BP revealed a full-year loss of $18bn, its first since the Deepwater Horizon disaster more than a decade ago, while US oil giant ExxonMobil reported an annual loss of $22.4bn – its first ever. Shell capped a year in which it slashed its dividend for the first time since the second world war with a debit of almost $20bn.

Government says project will create 300 jobs and will test and improve technologies, including a refuelling station for hydrogen vehicles

The Victorian government has given $10m for a hub in Melbourne’s south-east that will test and improve hydrogen technologies.

The hub will be based at Swinburne University of Technology and study both clean energy vehicles and hydrogen storage.

Shining a light on an evil killer is easy and satisfying. It drives the script of the tales in which we absorb ourselves as we retreat from a world become too much

When I was growing up, one of my parents’ favourite albums was a live recording of a Pete Seeger concert called We Shall Overcome. On it was his rendition of a Bob Dylan song called Who Killed Davey Moore. Pete’s voice imploring an answer to that question would ring out from the record player in the living room and across the house.

The song explores the question of who bore responsibility for the death of an African American boxer who was killed in the ring when he was just 30 years old. Each verse begins with the refrain, “Who killed Davey Moore?” In the verse that follows, some group or individual associated with his life and death – the coach, the crowd, the manager, the gambling man, the boxing writer, the other fighter – gives their answer. Each, in turn, responds “Not I”, and explains that they cannot rightfully be accused of killing Davey Moore. They were just doing what it is that they do: going to the fight, organising the fight, writing about the fight, throwing the punches, and so on. And, of course, they are each telling the truth. Or a truth of sorts.

Photographic artist Alex Frayne has shot the landscapes of South Australia for over two decades. His latest book, Landscapes of South Australia, pays homage to its deserts, hills, plains and waters

Party calls for flagship renewables scheme to be extended amid significant delays and problems

Labour is calling for the government’s green homes grant scheme to be extended by at least a year after revealing that less than 5% of the allocated budget has been given to householders.

Nearly five months in, only £71m of the allocated £1.5bn budget for householders has been awarded to those seeking help to move from fossil fuel heating to renewable alternatives.

Protesters ‘in the muck together’ since 27 January say they are in good spirits as they resist eviction

Packs of cards and plentiful supplies of chocolate are essential parts of the tunnel survival kit, according to the environmental activists living underneath Euston to protest about HS2 – the high-speed rail link that is due to come into the London station.

Since the early hours of 27 January, nine activists from the campaign group HS2 Rebellion have been occupying a network of tunnels they and others dug out.

Papers reveal federal environment department officials warned against preemptively handing approval powers to states

Federal officials warned against transferring environmental approval powers to state governments before a major review of conservation laws was complete, saying it could undermine hopes of substantial reform.

Despite the warning, the Morrison and Western Australian governments pushed ahead with plans to give the states greater authority in approving developments before the formal review by former competition watchdog head Graeme Samuel was finished.

So far the PM’s new rhetoric on net zero doesn’t match the substance and the only way that will change is if he can corral the Nationals

Back in the olden times, when circumstances required John Howard to backflip, he made a performance of it. Howard’s purpose was simple: the prime minister wanted everyone to notice the shift.

Scott Morrison isn’t from the Howard backflip school. His style is more liquid. But I think Morrison wanted voters to notice when his language shifted significantly on Australia achieving net zero emissions by 2050 – a pivot that followed Joe Biden’s victory in the US election.

With its natural predator in decline, roo numbers are growing – and research suggests the marsupial is doing more damage than rabbits in the country’s interior

The experimental fencing had gone up to keep the rabbits out, but the ground inside the conservation area at Yathong in central New South Wales had still been nibbled and munched bare.

“It was completely denuded,” says Prof Mike Letnic. “It was like a moonscape.”

The best of the week’s wildlife pictures, from starfish at Dogger Bank to a sky full of migrating birds in Kashmir to the last moments in the life of a zebra brought down by cheetahs

Governments could be at the start of a slow but huge transformation in how they treat natural life

One of the most important things about this week’s landmark review into the value of nature may appear to be a footling detail: its publisher. The 600-page report was commissioned by the Treasury, headed by Rishi Sunak, rather than the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, whose boss is George Eustice. The difference appears to be tiny – the two ministries are a mere 10-minute walk apart – but it represents a huge paradigm shift. For this is the first time any country’s finance ministry has put out a comprehensive study into the economic importance of maintaining a variety of life on Earth. Its author is Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta, a Cambridge economist. His argument is both needed and subversive: our economic models and our models for how to run an economy both require urgent overhaul if humanity is to survive and prosper.

For so long, government ministers have treated biodiversity as way down the to-do list, beneath winning the next election and ensuring asset markets and public services are not in meltdown. Plurality and integrity of natural life, of everything from parasites to parakeets, is no more objectionable to a politician than the latest Attenborough documentary. But doing much about it has never seemed a high enough priority.

An auction of offshore plots for future windfarms is being held by the Crown Estate

The Queen’s ownership of the British coastline is as old as the monarchy itself. But her right to collect royalties from wind and wave power is much more recent: it was granted by Tony Blair’s Labour government in a 2004 act of parliament.

The Crown Estate, which manages the royal property portfolio, is holding the first auction of seabed plots for windfarm turbines in a decade. It emerged this week that bidding has reached record highs as energy firms look to diversify away from oil.