The Guardian

Protesters intend to prevent Sun, Times, Telegraph and Mail titles from reaching newstands

Extinction Rebellion protesters blocked roads leading to two UK printworks owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp on Friday evening.

The group’s members said they would maintain the blockade throughout the night using vehicles and bamboo lock-ons to try to prevent the company’s papers from reaching newsstands on Saturday.

As the oil industry plans a big increase in the manufacture of packaging, the need for international action on waste has never been clearer

From shocking footage of an albatross chick killed by a plastic toothpick to images of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and recent coverage of the increase in litter left behind by visitors to the British countryside during the pandemic, there is no shortage of evidence of the harm and ugliness caused by plastic. Public awareness of the problem has grown rapidly over recent years in many countries, and led to new legislation. But while environmental organisations work hard to highlight links between the plastics and oil industries – and while pollution of the oceans and failures by the waste and recycling industry have become key themes for campaigners – the issue of plastics is still not widely enough recognised as a consequence of our dependence on fossil fuels.

Reports of plans by the oil industry to expand the supply of virgin plastics by a quarter over five years, while putting pressure on countries such as Kenya to lift restrictions on their use, show how urgently this needs to change. Plastics are not a byproduct of the fossil fuel industry. They are a product of it. The expansion of plastics manufacturing, on which companies including Saudi Aramco and Royal Dutch Shell plan to spend about $400bn (£300bn), is part of the industry’s coordinated response to the reduced demand for fuel brought about by the shift to renewable energy and electric vehicles.

The pick of the world’s best flora and fauna photos, including wild cats and a raccoon rescue

Greta Thunberg praised the film I Am Greta, presented at the 2020 Venice film festival, for reflecting her as a 'shy, nerdy person', which she said 'is the person that I am'.

The Sweedish climate activist called for more action to be taken to address the climate crisis by adults and politicians when she appeared by video link at the film festival on Friday 4 September.

In I am Greta, Nathan Grossman documents Thunberg's life as one of the most famous teenagers in the world after she became the figurehead for a global climate crisis campaign

• Greta Thunberg: don't dump climate crisis on children to fix

Bureau of Land Management accused of giving a handout to rich corporations at the expense of states who depend on oil revenues

The oil and gas industry has been allowed to pay far less than usual to the government for the right to drill on public lands under a controversial Trump administration coronavirus relief policy, an analysis by a watchdog group and the Guardian reveals.

The Bureau of Land Management has granted economic relief for drilling on land leased by the energy giants BP and ExxonMobil, according to records from the bureau.

Artist Sarah Gillespie’s prints of moths represent the culmination of an 18 months-long project designed to attract attention to the plight of the insect, whose numbers have dropped 60-70% since the 1970s, but whose survival is vital for numerous bird populations. Gillespie’s mezzotints and silverpoint drawings are exhibited at Kestle Barton in Cornwall, a venue that boasts more than 60 species of moths in its gardens, 12 September to 31 October.

Major oil firms plan to grow plastic supply to counter impact of shift against fossil fuels

The war on plastic waste could scupper the oil industry’s multi-billion dollar bet that the world will continue to need more fossil fuels to help make the petrochemicals used in plastics, according to a new report.

Major oil companies, including Saudi Aramco and Royal Dutch Shell, plan to spend about $400bn (£300bn) to help grow the supply of virgin plastics by a quarter over the next five years, to compensate for the impact of electric vehicles and clean energy technologies on demand for fossil fuels.

It seems our leaders don’t want tricky environmental matters elevated to them, so they plan to flick responsibility to the states

What a cruel irony it is that just when our prime minister is bemoaning the fact that state governments can adversely affect the economy by closing their borders, his government seeks to pass the health and welfare of our environment and natural world into the hands of these very same states.

Despite the dramatic and tragic impacts of the last bushfire season on the Australian community, both physically and economically, and the just released interim report of the royal commission into them, the government seeks to rush ahead with ill-considered changes to the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act. This report is peppered with references to the need for national initiatives. It raises the prospect of the national cabinet managing future natural disasters, calls for the immediate rollout of a national emergency warning system and highlights the need for a national app for all such disasters.

A bumper litter of kids has helped the distinctive, long-horned wild goats to prosper after being introduced from Spain

The population of ibex recently introduced to the French Pyrenees is thriving more than a century after the native species was wiped out in France.

Officials have counted 70 newborn ibex this year at the Pyrenees national park and nearby Ariege regional park in the craggy mountains that separate France and Spain.

Cost deterrent ‘risks UK being in slow lane’ in transition from fossil fuel vehicles, says car industry body

Expensive prices for electric cars could hold back the UK’s transition from fossil fuel vehicles, the industry has warned, amid signs that demand for electric vehicles (EVs) is waning.

Related: Electric cars: five best buys, from new models to used bargains

For one brief shining moment it seemed humanity’s inability to imagine much beyond our lived experience was irrelevant. Covid was coming for us all

• This is part of a series of essays by Australian writers responding to the challenges of 2020

The chicken shack was nearly an hour’s walk through Seoul in the subzero night, but they served up damn good chicken, and dangerously cheap beer, and we agreed the risk of becoming lost and freezing to death on the street was worth it. My son, Thomas, spent his early years in Canberra, and he does not feel the cold like I do, routinely sleeping with his bedroom windows wide open through the winter. But on this night even he swaddled up with multiple layers of hoodies, scarves and so much Korean puffer-wear that we were less men than giant, shambling marshmallows in search of the dirty bird.

There was, as well, a quiet pleasure to be had from the killing cold. When we had flown out of Australia a few days earlier the whole of the sky was smeared a smoky orange ochre, and the familiar steam press humidity of summer in the subtropics had evaporated under a furnace blast of dry heat from the heart of the continent. It felt good to shiver and contemplate the lot of everyone we’d left behind, especially as we drummed greasy fingertips on painfully distended tummies full of spicy chicken meat. But enjoyment would pass.

Marine park authority cites excessive and illegal fishing that can hit resilience of reef’s ecosystem

Under-regulated fishing along the Great Barrier Reef is putting the world’s biggest coral reef system at further risk as it deals with repeated mass bleaching events, the Australia government’s marine park authority has found.

Conservationists and recreational fishing groups have told Guardian Australia the Queensland government’s rollout of major fisheries reforms, designed to tackle the issues along the reef, has stalled.

Sussan Ley announces audit after Guardian Australia revealed her department allowed the birds to be exported to Germany

The environment minister, Sussan Ley, has appointed an auditor to investigate her own department over the export of hundreds of native and endangered parrots to Germany over a three-year period.

Guardian Australia revealed in 2018 that the Australian government permitted the export of hundreds of birds to a German organisation despite concerns they were being offered for sale rather than exhibited.

List comes after Trump order in June directed agencies to use emergency authority to speed projects amid economic downturn

The Trump administration has identified dozens of major fossil fuel, energy and water projects that could be fast-tracked by expediting environmental reviews amid the pandemic, according to internal government documents.

At least 19 of the projects are from companies that have spent a total of $16m lobbying the interior department since early 2017, according to an analysis by the conservation group the Center for Western Priorities. ConocoPhillips spent $11.2m of that amount lobbying the department, including on plans to drill for oil and gas within the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska, the group said.

Gulf Livestock 1, carrying more than 40 crew members and nearly 6,000 cattle, foundered off coast of Japan

New Zealand has suspended live cattle exports after a ship carrying almost 6,000 animals sank off the Japanese coast on Wednesday. There are growing fears for the fate of the more than 40 crew members on the Gulf Livestock 1, with reports of just one survivor so far.

The vessel was on its way to China when it reportedly developed engine problems and sank in rough seas caused by Typhoon Maysak, the survivor said.

The rescued Filipino crew member was recovered after a Japanese navy P-3C surveillance aircraft spotted him wearing a life vest and waving while bobbing in the water.

Inspired by the fear and loathing on display at the Republican National Convention, Anohni talks us through her latest song and its uniquely unsettling video

I watched the Republican National Convention last week. It’s becoming harder to put into words the dread that many of us feel.

What’s really happening? Toxic levels of corruption and collusion are devouring the US. Christian extremists want to turn the country into a religious state straight out of The Handmaid’s Tale.

The devastating blazes began just as I began a two-week quarantine. We desperately need leadership

At 10am on 16 August, I drove east from Santa Cruz to Oakland to my mom’s nursing home, where I was being allowed in, in full PPE, to kiss her a last goodbye. As I curved north through San Jose, I could see a billowing steel-gray fire cloud among the hills to the east. Lightning flashed past Berkeley as I pulled into the parking lot. On the way home, I took the long route across the San Mateo Bridge, then over the top of the San Francisco Peninsula and south from Half Moon Bay. Halfway down the coast I saw a helicopter dropping bright red pillows of retardant on to a fire streaming its smoke in a flat horizontal panel out to the ocean. Ten minutes later I passed white smoke pouring down another canyon on my left. Before I pulled into my driveway at the edge of Santa Cruz, I could see a fourth, giant fire spewing far to the south beyond Salinas.

By afternoon it was clear that the fires I’d seen were just a few of the hundreds sparked all over northern California by freak thunderstorms that weekend, in which 10,800 lightning strikes ignited 367 fires. Soon, hundreds of the small fires converged into bigger and bigger ones, so fast and so vast that Cal Fire didn’t even give names to the largest ones as it usually does, resorting to acronyms like the SCU Lightning Complex, the LNU Lightning Complex, and my own fire to the north and east of Santa Cruz, the CZU Lightning Complex.

UK study shows dorsal fin of prehistoric mega-fish was similar height to adult human

The enormous size of a prehistoric mega-shark made famous in Hollywood films has been revealed for the first time in its entirety by a UK study.

Previously only the length of the Otodus megalodon had been estimated, but a team from the University of Bristol and Swansea University has determined the size of the rest of its body, including fins as large as an adult human.

Conservationists say relaxing of regulations poses threat to welfare of minke whales

Demand for whale meat in Norway is rising after years of decline, although activists have warned the loosening of regulations could damage the welfare of the animals.

Norway remains one of only three countries to publicly allow commercial whaling, along with Japan and Iceland. Much of the catch is sent to Japan, where demand is high, but for the first time in years businesses have reported increased interest in eating whale meat domestically.

Liberty condemns ‘unworkable restrictions, fines and arrests’ used by police to stifle rallies

Civil liberty experts have warned that peaceful protest is under threat in the UK after environmental campaigners were targeted with pre-emptive arrest and “unworkable restrictions” were placed on this week’s Extinction Rebellion (XR) demonstrations.

Thousands of people have taken to the streets this week to highlight the escalating climate emergency and demand urgent action from the government.