The Guardian

Campaigners call for penalties to rise to £1,000 after FOI data reveals lack of punitive action

Most councils issue less than one fine a week to litterers, according to data obtained via freedom of information rules, with one in six issuing no fines at all across a year.

Enforcement varied widely, with a handful of the councils in England and Wales issuing more than 100 a week.

Three-night event aims to track creatures’ climate-driven spread into new parts of UK

People are being invited to help track the spread of a moth that often hides its hindwings of dazzling fuchsia beneath a dowdy brown “overcoat”.

The dark crimson underwing has enjoyed an “amazing” August, according to experts, appearing in many new locations, including the first ever recorded sighting in Wales.

The Morrison government’s new environment legislation has been described by critics as a reproduction of Tony Abbott’s failed one-stop-shop laws

The Morrison government has been condemned for breaking its commitment to include new national environmental standards with legislation that will transfer development approval powers to the states and territories.

Labor, the Greens and environment groups have described the bill, introduced on Thursday, as an almost identical reproduction of the Abbott government’s failed 2014 one-stop-shop laws.

Concern mounts that bill won’t include promised new national environmental standards

The Coalition is being urged to not push through changes to conservation laws that would transfer more development approval powers to the states unless it plans to also introduce promised new national environmental standards.

There is growing concern a bill due to be introduced to parliament this week will not include the new standards, which were promised last month by the environment minister, Sussan Ley.

Republicans at the convention did not lay out a plan for climate change, nor even acknowledge it

The Republican national convention, dominated by veneration of Donald Trump and bleak warnings of the dangers of socialism, has completely ignored the climate crisis, an omission that has disturbed some conservatives who warn the party risks being left behind by voters.

Convention speeches have included Eric Trump praising the beauty of the Grand Canyon, a region his father’s administration is open to mining for uranium, while several speakers have attacked Joe Biden, the Democratic presidential nominee, as a threat to oil and gas worker jobs.

The remote Western Australian town of Kalbarri could find itself at the bleeding edge of a renewables revolution

Brandon Bickford is only in town for the weekend. The 26-year-old has come back home to Kalbarri, the tiny Western Australian town where he grew up, with his fiancée to visit family. He’ll be making the 574km drive back south to Perth on Monday morning.

The young man with an athletic build says growing up here was like living in the flipside of a postcard. In his teenage years he “ran amok” between the ancient cliffs that hug the coast and the rugged natural landscape that stretches out to the horizon.

Australia loves coal. About 60% of our electricity still comes from polluting, coal-fired power plants, while only 20% comes from renewables. Successive governments have told us that decommissioning coal-fired power would hurt the economy and cause a wave of unemployment. But that's not actually true. In fact, there are enormous opportunities to create jobs and wealth in renewable industries in Australia, including in exporting to countries without the sun and space we enjoy here

Australia loves coal. About 60% of our electricity still comes from polluting, coal-fired power plants, while only 20% comes from renewables. Successive governments have told us that decommissioning coal-fired power would hurt the economy and cause a wave of unemployment. But that's not actually true. In fact, there are enormous opportunities to create jobs and wealth in renewable industries in Australia, including in exporting to countries without the sun and space we enjoy here

Founding partner says ‘investing in the resilience of nature is investing in the resilience of the economy’

A push to better recognise the economic value of “natural capital” – water systems, biodiversity, soil and carbon stores – has prompted the creation of what aims to be the world’s largest investment firm dedicated to projects that help the planet.

Multinational financial services giant HSBC and Pollination, a boutique climate advisory and investment firm, announced a joint venture that they predicted would meet a multi-billion dollar demand for environmentally friendly investment beyond renewable energy.

Critics say plan for fields off Svalbard threatens ecosystem and relations with Russia

Norway is planning to expand oil drilling in previously untouched areas of the Arctic, a move campaigners say threatens the fragile ecosystem and could spark a military standoff with Russia.

A public consultation on the opening up of nine new Norwegian oilfields closed on Wednesday. The areas in question are much further north in the Arctic than the concessions the US president, Donald Trump, announced for Alaska this month.

Our food supply comes from an environmentally unsustainable system that is going to unravel

Picture an ideal dinner plate. If you’re like most Americans, it features a hearty portion of meat, from animals fattened on midwestern corn and soybeans, and a helping of vegetables, largely trucked in from California. The unique landscapes we rely on to deliver this bounty – the twin jewels of the US food system – are locked in a state of slow-motion ecological unravelling.

California’s agricultural sector has flourished from decades of easy access to water in one of the globe’s biggest swaths of Mediterranean climate. The Sierra Nevada, the spine of mountains that runs along California’s eastern flank, captures an annual cache of snow that, when it melts, cascades into a network of government-built dams, canals and aqueducts that deliver irrigation water to farmers in the adjoining Central Valley. In light-snow years, farmers could tap aquifers that had built up over millennia to offset the shortfall.

Exclusive: Lawyers for Australian Conservation Foundation warned department issuing grant money before due process could be ‘improper’

The federal government quietly finalised an agreement to pay $3.6m to a company proposing a coal-fired power station at Collinsville in north Queensland this month, despite prior warnings the grant could be disallowed by the parliament and that making any payment beforehand could be “improper”.

Last week, ahead of the return of federal parliament – where the grant to Shine Energy will be subject to a disallowance motion, backed by Labor and the Greens – the federal government’s grants register was updated to include the final details of the controversial handout.

Rising consumption by the affluent has a far greater environmental impact than the birth rate in poorer nations

When a major study was published last month, showing that the global population is likely to peak then crash much sooner than most scientists had assumed, I naively imagined that people in rich nations would at last stop blaming all the world’s environmental problems on population growth. I was wrong. If anything, it appears to have got worse.

Next week the BirthStrike movement – founded by women who, by announcing their decision not to have children, seek to focus our minds on the horror of environmental collapse – will dissolve itself, because its cause has been hijacked so virulently and persistently by population obsessives. The founders explain that they had “underestimated the power of ‘overpopulation’ as a growing form of climate breakdown denial”.

Analysis shows the government, which has committed to a ‘gas-led recovery’, has failed to properly account for methane’s effect on global heating

Australia’s greenhouse gas accounting underestimates national emissions by about 10%, largely due to a failure to properly recognise the impact of methane released during gas production, an analysis has found.

In late June, the energy and emissions reduction minister, Angus Taylor, amended laws to reflect a scientific consensus that methane – a highly potent but short-lived greenhouse gas that leaks during gas processing – plays a greater role in heating the planet than previously thought.

This southern European native, first spotted breeding in 2007, is still rare due to a lack of suitable sites

If you see a violet carpenter bee, xylocopa violacea, in Britain, it seems too exotic for our shores, and too big. It is up to 3cm long, the size of our largest bumble bee, and it looks even larger when flying with an impressive buzz.

In late August, the adults emerge from a dead tree trunk or other old wood where they have spent the larval stage. After mating in late April or May, female bees bore holes in rotten wood and lay eggs in separate chambers, each one sealed in with a store of pollen so the emerging larvae can have a good start in life.

Project includes inscriptions dating back hundreds of years spotted by members of the public

Some are fading records of passionate woodland trysts, while others tell vividly of the fear of the supernatural that some still feel in the forest: they are the more than 100 pieces of graffiti carved into trees in the New Forest in the south of England that have been spotted by members of the public and collected by the national park authority.

There are, not surprisingly, plenty of lovers’ initials but also “witch marks”, etched into bark to try to ward off people suspected of evil intent and examples of the “king’s mark”, which was used to identify trees chosen to be chopped down to make warships.

Campaigner says decision at odds with Paris agreement to achieve net zero by 2050

An environmental campaigner is mounting a legal challenge to the government’s decision to exclude waste incinerators from its post-Brexit carbon emissions trading scheme designed to bring the UK to net zero emissions by 2050.

Georgia Elliott-Smith, a sustainability consultant who is fighting the expansion of the Edmonton incinerator, is seeking a judicial review of the omission of what legal papers say are “staggering” levels of CO2 emissions from waste incinerators.

Slaughterhouse figures from a three-year period highlight poor conditions in Britain’s poultry sector, say campaigners

More than 61 million chickens were rejected because of diseases and defects at slaughterhouses in England and Wales over a three-year period, according to figures analysed by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and the Guardian.

Broilers, chickens raised for meat, were the worst affected with almost 59 million defects recorded. More than 39 million broilers arrived and were rejected at slaughter due to disease – approximately 35,000 every day.

A sycamore laced with the shoes of jubilant students, a haunted oak bound in chains and a Hackney plane facing the chop are among the 10 contenders to become England’s tree of the year. The Woodland Trust’s annual competition throws the spotlight on the country’s best-loved trees to drive interest in their value and protection

Public invited to choose online from list including haunted oak and sycamore full of shoes

A haunted oak, a sycamore laced with the shoes of celebrating students and a Hackney plane tree threatened with destruction are among the contenders for England’s tree of the year.

The Woodland Trust’s annual competition to celebrate individual trees and our relationship with them also includes contests in Wales and Scotland, where nominees include a photogenic fern-leaved beech in Port Talbot that has starred in Doctor Who, Songs of Praise and Sex Education, Britain’s oldest Indian bean tree and a hawthorn planted by Mary, Queen of Scots.