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From LNG to drilling in Alaska, here’s everything you need to know about Trump’s energy and climate executive orders
Through a flurry of executive orders, a newly inaugurated Donald Trump has made clear his support for the ascendancy of fossil fuels, the dismantling of support for cleaner energy and the United States’ exit from the fight to contain the escalating climate crisis.
“We will drill, baby, drill,” the president said in his inaugural address on Monday. “We have something that no other manufacturing nation will ever have – the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on Earth, and we are going to use it. We’re going to use it.”
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Instead of burning or transporting their garden waste, residents of an English village built their own composting site
In the village of Thrupp, where houses are spread out over steep winding roads in the narrow Frome Valley, it’s difficult for lorries to get through to collect garden waste.
It leaves some people with the choice of lengthy car trips to a nearby town to take their green waste to a facility, or burning their rubbish in small bonfires that have prompted many irate social media posts.
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Mark Avery to stand down from role with Wild Justice but won’t completely give up campaigning, he insists
If government ministers and civil servants are grey squirrels, they may think they can rest easy – the predatory pine marten in the Westminster jungle is leaving them in peace.
A campaigner who has “created a landscape of fear” over the authorities’ failure to protect nature is stepping back from Wild Justice to spend more time with the wildlife – and grandchildren – in his garden.
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As the captain of a royal research ship, I break ice to get to British stations in the Antarctic. It’s great fun - but getting stuck is always a risk
I have been working for the British Antarctic Survey since I was 19. I started icebreaking on my first trip to the Antarctic and got hooked. Now I am the captain of the royal research ship Sir David Attenborough and I find icebreaking addictive.
It’s unique in a maritime career to have the ability, even as a junior officer, to do quite intricate ship handling and manoeuvring at all stages. Ships break the ice continually, 24/7 – so the whole bridge team gets to do it.
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A decade ago, up to 1,000 of the apex predators lived in one South African bay. Now they have gone, fleeing from killer whales. But the gap they have left creates problems for other species
The first carcass of a great white, a small female, washed up in South Africa on 9 February 2017. The 2.6-metre-long body had no hook or net marks, ruling out human involvement. Whatever had killed her had vanished. So too had all the other great white sharks in Gansbaai on the Western Cape, Dr Alison Towner noticed.
“We had several sharks acoustically tagged, and later realised three had moved as far as Plettenberg Bay and Algoa Bay, more than 500km [300 miles] east,” says the Rhodes University marine biologist.
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The Marches, Shropshire: As the ice thins and the paths begin to stick, the ravens and owls are getting busy with their breeding season
Up on Cyrn y Bwch (Horns of the Buck), known as Old Racecourse Common, a plateau on the edge of the Oswestry Uplands, winter comes and goes in a week. There are still white punctuation marks fallen from the rich quiet of a snow spell that feels dreamlike now as the puddle ice thins to kitchen film and paths turn claggy.
The thaw is a kind of recall as the past returns. Mounds of heather, the grey, private memories of a heath, like an old tune muffled by bracken and birch. The racecourse grandstand ruins where 18th-century punters watched their fortunes gallop away like horses over the hills. West, the green folds of Powys. East, the sunlit plains of north Shropshire fading towards the Wrekin floating on the horizon. South, a track rolls down through conifers where a small stand of beech and oak are trapped, shadowy apparitions imprisoned in the vertical lines of the plantation.
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The original cotton totes have a ‘disarmingly short’ life cycle – so demand is high for a more environmentally friendly version
This year’s It bag isn’t made by any of the usual designers. And if this bag could talk, it wouldn’t say “calf leather” so much as “wash me at 40C”. What’s more, in an ideal world, you would never want to buy another again.
The “forever tote” is big business. Usually made from calico, an unbleached cotton designed to be reused, it’s similar to the cotton bags you have balled up at the bottom of a drawer, except it’s sturdy, with a reinforced base and handles, sometimes a pocket, often coloured (Yves Klein blue seems especially popular), and always conspicuously branded with logos. Demand is high.
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Many palm species in the city are receptive to embers, hard to extinguish – and probably helped spread the fires
When the Los Angeles wildfires broke out on the morning of 7 January, some of the most dramatic images were of palm trees set ablaze along Sunset Boulevard. In the days that followed, burning palms became a symbol to illustrate what may be the costliest wildfires in history, which left at least 25 dead and destroyed thousands of structures.
The trees are icons of the city. They also played a role in spreading the flames, researchers and fire officials say.
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Fans of the flower – known as Putricia – say they are ‘obsessed’ with the plant, although they have ‘never smelt that before’
In Sydney, word is spreading: a rare endangered plant named after a deformed penis is beginning to unfurl.
Outside Sydney’s Royal Botanic Garden greenhouse on Thursday, a diverse crowd of hundreds has formed. International tourists wait expectantly by families and young, trendy couples. Babies are everywhere.
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Acronyms, in-jokes and online fan clubs spring up as viewers across the globe prepare for Sydney’s first corpse bloom in 15 years – from a safe distance
In a Sydney greenhouse, a tall pointed flower is about to bloom for the first time in years.
To the scientific community, the Botanic Gardens of Sydney’s corpse flower is known as amorphophallus titanum, which translates to large, deformed penis. But online, the rare endangered plant has taken on a new name: Putricia.
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