The Guardian

Leaked report says tax would slow emissions cuts, with South Australia and Victoria warned before they announced plan to introduce charge

Australian state governments were warned a road user tax on clean cars introduced without other support for the technology could discourage its uptake and impede greenhouse gas cuts. The advice was received before South Australia and Victoria announced plans to introduce a charge on driving electric vehicles (EVs).

A leaked report to the Board of Treasurers – a states and territories forum – shows it jointly commissioned advice on how to best introduce road-user charging on zero and low-emissions vehicles after agreeing to “high-level principles” earlier this year.

Ella Kissi-Debrah’s fatal asthma attack coincided with a high air pollution episode

The hospital admissions of a nine-year-old girl who died after an acute asthma attack almost all took place during autumn and winter months when air pollution levels are at their highest, an inquest heard on Tuesday.

Prof Stephen Holgate, a respiratory disease expert, said Ella Kissi-Debrah had been living on a knife-edge, and it would take just a small change to create a dramatic collapse in the child.

Party supporters and activists warn inaction over its green new deal could harm electoral chances

Labour risks losing support among young people unless it does more to champion a radical green new deal (GND) to tackle the climate crisis and rebuild the post-Covid economy with well-paid, unionised jobs, according to climate activists and young Labour supporters.

School climate strikers and key youth groups within the party say they have been dismayed by what they see as the party’s failure to fight for the full “green industrial revolution” programme set out at the last election. And they warn that the party risks losing support among young people who have backed Labour in the past few years.

Earth Photo, the international competition and exhibition created by Forestry England and the Royal Geographical Society with IBG, aims to encourage discussion about the environment by telling stories about the natural world, its inhabitants and our treatment of both

The unprecedented fires aren’t just caused by the climate crisis. Land use –especially real estate and animal husbandry – have a lot to answer for

A good, natural fire can be a cleansing force. Yet, the recent and ongoing catastrophic fires around the world – including in Brazil, the US, Sweden, Russia and Australia – are not moments of a healthy fire cycle but conflagrations of a dying biosphere.

Terrible as they are, the fires in the western American states are only middling on a global scale. As of early November, 8.6m acres (3.5m hectares) had burned nationally, with half of that total in California. This year has been the worst fire season on record for Colorado and California, the latter enduring five of its six largest fires since colonization. But the American catastrophe pales in comparison to Australia’s wildfires last summer, which incinerated an eye-watering 46m acres. More than a fifth of the country’s forests were destroyed in a single year. Siberia’s fires in 2020 were even bigger – 47m acres. A tenth of South America’s largest wetland, the Pantanal, went up in smoke this year – some 6m acres – coupled with the Amazon losing 8.5m acres. That latter figure is only half the size of last year’s fiery nightmare.

Scientist says no evidence to support theory Ella Kissi-Debrah’s condition worsened when air pollution rose

A leading scientist has told an inquest there is no evidence that a nine-year-old girl was admitted to hospital with acute asthma complications when levels of air pollution were higher.

Paul Wilkinson, a professor of environmental epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, told a coroner he had analysed levels of nitrogen dioxide and particulate matter on the days during her lifetime when Ella Kissi-Debrah had contact with, or was admitted to, hospital.

Australian PM last week insisted he would address forum to ‘correct mistruths’ about Coalition’s action on emissions

Scott Morrison does not yet have a speaker’s spot at a global climate ambition summit this weekend despite telling parliament last week he intended to use an appearance at the event to “correct mistruths” about his government’s heavily criticised record on emissions reduction.

A government spokesman on Monday night said Australia had been invited to take part in the 12 December summit “both personally by [British] prime minister Boris Johnson during a phone call with prime minister Morrison, and again in writing by the leaders of hosting nations: the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Chile and also the United Nations”.

Letters sent to the forestry agency advised logging in bushfire-affected areas should apply the ‘precautionary principle’ to consider threatened species

Victoria’s publicly-owned forestry agency has been allowed to restart logging in bushfire-ravaged east Gippsland despite a warning from a regulator there was a risk of “serious and irreversible damage” to the state’s biodiversity.

Documents released under freedom of information laws show the state’s conservation regulator twice wrote to VicForests during and after last summer’s catastrophic bushfires advising it should apply the “precautionary principle” when logging in the area.

Local wildlife trust says work has devastated Herefordshire river but landowner says EA asked him to do it

Environment agency officials were under pressure on Monday to explain exactly what consent they gave to carry out extensive work on the banks of a protected river in England.

Officials from the EA, Natural England and the Forestry Commission moved in last week to stop the work along the River Lugg outside Kingsland, near Leominster in Herefordshire.

Rosamund Kissi-Debrah ‘would have moved house’ if aware of level of pollution threat to her daughter

The mother of a nine-year-old girl who died after an acute asthma attack said she would have moved house immediately had she been told of the link between air pollution and her daughter’s condition.

Rosamund Kissi-Debrah told the inner south London coroner that she knew nothing about nitrogen dioxide or air pollution during her daughter’s life.

Companies accused of “zero progress” on reducing plastic waste, with Coca-Cola ranked No 1 for most littered products

Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and Nestlé have been accused of “zero progress” on reducing plastic waste, after being named the world’s top plastic polluters for the third year in a row.

Coca-Cola was ranked the world’s No 1 plastic polluter by Break Free From Plastic in its annual audit, after its beverage bottles were the most frequently found discarded on beaches, rivers, parks and other litter sites in 51 of 55 nations surveyed. Last year it was the most frequently littered bottle in 37 countries, out of 51 surveyed.

Climate crisis likely to cause warmer, wetter winters and hotter, drier summers, says Met Office

Snowball fights and sledging could be at risk because by the end of the century snow will not settle on the ground in much of the UK due to the climate crisis, Met Office analysis has suggested.

Detailed projections suggest traditional winter activities such as building snowmen could disappear if global greenhouse gas emissions are not reduced.

Man, 29, says shark bite at Kangaroo Island’s D’Estrees Bay was ‘like being hit by a truck’

Paramedics have hailed the “remarkable” survival story of a South Australian surfer who swam back to shore alone and walked 300 metres for help after suffering “extraordinary” injuries from a shark bite at a remote beach.

Paramedic Michael Rushby said the man had “serious” lacerations on his back, backside and leg “consistent with quite a large shark bite”, but managed to haul himself to safety.

Naima Brown’s encounter with a lab-grown chicken nugget reminded her of a Happy Meal – but she’s less certain about what it means for the future of food

“Clean”, “cultured”, “no-kill” – these are just a few of the monikers that have been applied to San Francisco-based food start up Just Inc’s lab-grown chicken nuggets.

The product has just been approved for sale to consumers in Singapore – a world first. But the company’s CEO Josh Tetrick would prefer it if everyone dropped the additional descriptors and just called his company’s product “meat”.

Clean energy firm Gridserve has plans for more than 100 such sites over next five years

Britain’s first all-electric car charging forecourt is set to open for business in Braintree, Essex, to charge electric vehicles with 100% renewable energy.

From Monday, the super-fast electric forecourt will deliver 350KW of charging power, or enough to add 200 miles of driving range, within 20 minutes, to up to 36 cars at a time.

Britain’s credibility as climate champion rests on bold and urgent action, say campaigners

Britain must end all oil and gas extraction in the North Sea as a matter of urgency if it is to maintain its position as a credible climate champion. That was the stark warning issued by green campaigners yesterday in the wake of last week’s decision by Denmark to halt its exploration for new North Sea reserves as part of its commitment to cut carbon emissions and tackle climate change.

The Danish decision is an embarrassment for Boris Johnson who announced last week that Britain would take a lead in the battle against global heating by cutting national carbon emissions by 68% by 2030, a rate faster than any other major economy.

With the developments in laboratory-cultured meat, vegetarians and vegans need to ask themselves: is it still about animal welfare or is it about stopping people eating meat?

Cultured meat, produced in bioreactors from muscle cells taken from live animals, has been approved for the first time by a regulatory authority. “Chicken bites” by San Francisco startup Eat Just have been approved for sale by the Singapore Food Agency. It’s a landmark moment that could lead to a revolution in “kind/clean” meat, significantly cutting down industrial livestock production, potentially doing away with it altogether.

Copenhagen-based Søren Solkær , best known for taking photographic portraits of big names in music and film such as Björk and David Lynch, has spent the past four years capturing starling murmurations. Inspired by traditional Japanese landscape painting and calligraphy, these stunning photographs are collected in a new book, Black Sun.

“The starlings move as one unified organism that vigorously opposes any outside threat. A strong visual expression is created, like that of an ink drawing or a calligraphic brush stroke, asserting itself against the sky,” says Solkær.

From non-polluting transport to sustainable industries, urban areas are perfect for testing radical solutions to global problems

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The pandemic will leave behind a very different world from that of a year ago. Thousands of people have died; entire industries have been brought to the brink; welfare states have been shaken. In the coming years, the major challenge facing all public leaders will be charting a path of recovery through the devastating human, social and economic marks that Covid-19 has left on our societies.

But rather than redoubling on the fragile world of the pre-pandemic age, we should be taking advantage of this moment to build one that is more just, balanced and sustainable.

The ABC’s Graham Creed says new climate change research could ‘fill a big gap’ in public understanding

Graham Creed has spent 30 years with his head in synoptic charts, and for the past 20 he’s been on television letting Australians know if it’s going to be hot, cold, wet or dry.

But for the past two years, usually at the end of months with heatwaves and extreme temperatures, Creed has been adding extra information to his weather segments.