The Guardian

Coronavirus closures will put millions of pounds worth of festive food at risk, firms warn

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Fresh festive food worth millions of pounds – including whole turkeys, lobsters and truffles – could be heading for the bin as restaurants and bars in London and parts of the south-east move into tier 3 coronavirus restrictions from midnight.

Under the tough new rules in England, hospitality venues have been ordered to close their doors – and cancel lucrative Christmas bookings – although they are allowed to offer limited takeaway food and delivery boxes.

The organisation has applied to overhaul the current pay scheme which sees some workers earning as little as $3 an hour

Unions have mounted a legal push for casual fruit pickers to be paid a minimum of $25 an hour, putting an end to farmers paying as little as $3 an hour under piece rate arrangements.

The Australian Workers’ Union on Tuesday afternoon applied to the industrial umpire, the Fair Work Commission, to change the Horticulture Award to introduce a minimum pay rate.

Angus Taylor seems to be wilfully ignoring Australia’s huge transport emissions problem

The announcement this week by energy minister Angus Taylor that he’s putting together a major package to prop up oil refineries to preserve dirty fuel supplies to one of the dirtiest car fleets on the planet simply beggars belief.

This week, we’ve seen king tides and storms hitting the country’s eastern coastline, changing the face of much-loved Aussie beaches, which were already feeling the effects of rising sea levels. This time last year, the country was on fire. In 2020 our Great Barrier reef was bleached for the third time in five years, the most widespread event ever. We just had the warmest spring ever, 2C above average, which would have been “virtually impossible” without our greenhouse gas emissions.

Beijing is aiming to control rain and snow across half the country. But it is the reason it wants to do this that is really frightening

Remember when Donald Trump wanted to nuke hurricanes so they didn’t hit the US? Everyone laughed uproariously, but Trump’s warped little mind was actually on to something. You may not be able to bomb hurricanes into oblivion, but you can shoot things into the atmosphere in order to change the weather. It’s a process known as cloud seeding and a number of countries, including the UK and the US, have been experimenting with it for decades.

There hasn’t been a huge amount of mainstream attention paid to cloud seeding or other forms of geoengineering, but now is the time to sit up and take notice: China has massively ramped up its efforts to control the weather, a move that should alarm us all.

At least six new or expanded mines could be built as a new conservative provincial government aims to increase coal production for export

With the price of Western Canadian oil languishing around $35 a barrel and Canadian oil sands companies hemorrhaging both workers and money, the province of Alberta sees its future in another fossil fuel: coal.

Ten thousand years of undisturbed nature will soon be open to the highest bidder, starting at $25 an acre

Language is everything.

Those who argue for oil drilling in the Arctic national wildlife refuge, a place of stunning wild beauty in far north-east Alaska, seldom call it what it is – a refuge.

Rewilding Britain charity says natural dispersal of seeds is cost-effective and boosts biodiversity

Allowing trees and woodland to regenerate through the natural dispersal of seeds should become the default way to restore Britain’s forest cover, according to a new report.

Natural regeneration brings the most benefits for biodiversity, is cost-effective and may sequester more carbon than previously thought, argues Rewilding Britain.

Rare discovery of reef cooled by channels formed during creation of Kilimanjaro is ‘something to hope for’, say scientists

Scientists have discovered a climate crisis refuge for coral reefs off the coast of Kenya and Tanzania, where species are thriving despite warming events that have killed their neighbours.

The coral sanctuary is a wildlife hotspot, teeming with spinner dolphins and boasting rare species, including prehistoric fish and dugongs. Researchers believe its location in a cool spot in the ocean is helping to protect it and the surrounding marine life from the harmful effects of the climate crisis.

Team will study effects on environment of A-68A, which is heading for South Georgia

Scientists are preparing for an urgent mission to the world’s biggest iceberg, which is on a collision course with the island of South Georgia in the southern Atlantic Ocean.

The A-68A iceberg, which is larger than Luxembourg, broke off from the Larsen C ice shelf in Antarctica in 2017 and has been drifting towards the island ever since.

Warning of future dogged by crises if recovery entrenches environmental problems and inequalities

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Unless leaders make the right choices on recovering from the pandemic to avoid entrenching environmental problems and social inequalities, the world faces a future of lurching from crisis to crisis, reversing gains made in recent decades in health, education, social freedom and combating poverty, the UN has warned.

The unprecedented impacts of the coronavirus pandemic, combined with the environmental crises the world is facing, threaten to wind back human progress and development, leaving societies around the world vulnerable and more unequal, according to a new report from the UN development programme (UNDP).

$28m grant was intended to help rural communities recover from oil drilling not help industry expand deeper into the state, suit claims

In July 2019, a proposed railway intended to shuttle fossil fuels across a mountainous corner of eastern Utah received a $28m grant from a local, state-run community fund. The financing allowed the group behind the railway – the Seven County Infrastructure Coalition – to kick off a federally mandated environmental impact survey, that would need to be completed before construction could begin.

There was just one problem: the grant came from a pot of money set aside to help Utahns recover from the state’s legacy of oil drilling, not help the industry expand deeper into the state.

Action points for first 100 days of Joe Biden presidency seen as boost to international action currently falling behind

The US will hold a climate summit of the world’s major economies early next year, within 100 days of Joe Biden taking office, and seek to rejoin the Paris agreement on the first day of his presidency, in a boost to international climate action.

Leaders from 75 countries met without the US in a virtual Climate Ambition Summit co-hosted by the UN, the UK and France at the weekend, marking the fifth anniversary of the Paris accord. The absence of the US underlined the need for more countries, including other major economies such as Brazil, Russia and Indonesia, to make fresh commitments on tackling the climate crisis.

Order made by Defra for the first time in four years, as thousands of birds have been culled in Great Britain

Millions of free-range hens and other birds must be kept indoors from Monday under a national government crackdown to try to curtail the spread of a virulent strain of avian flu sweeping across Great Britain.

Keepers have had 11 days to prepare for the strict new lockdown-style measures, including taking steps to safeguard animal welfare, consult their vet and where necessary erect additional housing or self-contained netted areas.

Wide-ranging review finds whales, dolphins, turtles and seabirds at mortal risk from marine debris

Plastic bags and flexible packaging are the deadliest plastic items in the ocean, killing wildlife including whales, dolphins, turtles and seabirds around the globe, according to a review of hundreds of scientific articles.

Discarded fishing line and nets as well as latex gloves and balloons were also found to be disproportionately lethal when compared with other ocean debris that animals mistakenly eat.

Homegrown veg and even turkeys are on the menu for people converted to self-sufficiency during lockdown

It’s hard to reuse a chocolate advent calendar, but for Maya Levy it’s one of the best parts of Christmas.

“It’s really cool – it’s in the shape of a gingerbread house. You melt the chocolate and wrap it in some foil,” she said. Each chocolate parcel goes into tiny wooden drawers in the advent calendar – one element of the 24-year-old marine biologist’s attempts to have an entirely sustainable Christmas.

The Committee on Climate Change has shown that decarbonising is not only affordable but highly desirable

Few crises come with a users’ manual. The government’s official climate advisers, the Committee on Climate Change, have come close, however, with a new 1,000-page tome setting out a blueprint for how Britain can decarbonise its economy and cut emissions to virtually zero by 2050.

The committee’s green manifesto, published last week, brings to heel the two most pervasive myths that climate deniers have set to stalk Britain’s climate ambitions. The first is a menacing right-wing imagining of economic hardship in which the “eye-watering costs” of green investment collide with a slowdown in productivity and growth. This is a fallacy easily disproved.

When world leaders get serious about reducing carbon emissions, we can raise families determined to improve the planet’s future

When I had my daughter I felt like the first person to have a baby; now I’ve had my son, I feel like I might be the last. An academic study into how young people factor climate change into their reproductive choices makes for dark reading, with 96% “very or extremely” concerned about their potential children in a climate-changed world. For some the concern is so severe they’ve decided not to have children at all. “I can’t in good conscience bring a child into this world and force them to try to survive what may be apocalyptic conditions,” one 27-year-old woman said.

More shocking even, were the 6% of parents who confessed to feeling remorse about having children. One 42-year-old father painted a Goya-like picture of his children’s adult life, “a hot-house hell, with wars over limited resources, collapsing civilisation, failing agriculture, rising seas, melting glaciers, starvation, droughts, floods, mudslides and widespread devastation”. After reading this, I put the kettle on and had a small cup of tea and waited until my hands stopped shaking. Bloody hell. Literally, bloody hell. Man, I feel for that dad, singing his children to sleep before curling up on the landing and rocking, slowly. As well as pressing upon one of my archipelago of dready bruises, his quote made me consider the intellectual compromises required in order to have a baby.

Minister tells more than 80 world leaders that not enough is being done

The world is still not on track to fulfil the 2015 Paris climate agreement, the UK’s business secretary Alok Sharma warned, after a summit of more than 70 world leaders on the climate crisis ended with few new commitments on greenhouse gas emissions.

Sharma said: “[People] will ask ‘Have we done enough to put the world on track to limit warming to 1.5C and protect people and nature from the effects of climate change?’ We must be honest with ourselves – the answer to that is currently no.”

At the world’s biggest coal export port in Newcastle, no China-bound ships are waiting or scheduled to load before Christmas

Three years ago, pictures of bulk carriers queued off the coast of Mackay in central Queensland were framed as evidence of a “renaissance” in the coal industry.

There were more than 70 coal ships in the offshore gridlock in December 2017. This year there are just 12 waiting – equalling a record low mark set at the height of the coronavirus pandemic.

Every country should declare a state of climate emergency until the world has reached net-zero carbon emissions, the UN secretary general told a virtual summit of world leaders on Saturday. António Guterres said countries had a responsibility to young people to reduce and eliminate high-carbon activities after borrowing trillions to cushion the economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic

• UN secretary general urges all countries to declare climate emergencies

• UK to stop funding overseas fossil fuel projects