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Phil Bellamy’s daughters refuse to ride in his electric car without travel sickness tablets. Are there other solutions?
It was a year in to driving his daughter to school in his new electric vehicle that Phil Bellamy discovered she dreaded the 10-minute daily ride – it made her feel sick in a way no other car did.
As the driver, Bellamy had no problems with the car but his teenage daughters struggled with sickness every time they entered the vehicle. Research has shown this is an issue – people who did not usually have motion sickness in a conventional car found that they did in EVs.
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As Swiss glaciers melt at an ever-faster rate, new species move in and flourish, but entire ecosystems and an alpine culture can be lost
• Photographs by Nicholas JR White
From the slopes behind the village of Ernen, it is possible to see the gouge where the Fiesch glacier once tumbled towards the valley in the Bernese Alps. The curved finger of ice, rumpled like tissue, cuts between high buttresses of granite and gneiss. Now it has melted out of sight.
People here once feared the monstrous ice streams, describing them as devils, but now they dread their disappearance. Like other glaciers in the Alps and globally, the Fiesch is melting at ever-increasing rates. More than ice is lost when the giants disappear: cultures, societies and entire ecosystems are braided around the glaciers.
The Aletsch glacier viewed from Moosfluh, looking towards the Olmenhorn and Eggishorn peaks
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Blackstone founder Stephen Schwarzman acted legally, but residents complained to Southern Water
A Donald Trump-backing billionaire has been stopped from transporting water in tankers to fill a lake on his Wiltshire estate during a drought.
Southern Water has told tanker companies to cease delivering water to Stephen Schwarzman’s 2,500-acre estate after local residents filmed vehicles going day and night to its grounds.
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Drakes Broughton, Worcestershire: The scourge of rural litter is enough to bring anyone together, even a farmer and us, trying to camp for the night in his field
In deepest rural Worcestershire – unfamiliar country for a mountaineer and a Welshman – we need a place to sleep. Our hedged lane skirts a little copse, and tired eyes pick out a gap; a couple of big steps over the brambles and we’re in. We haul the bike trailer (heavy with cans and bottles, picked up over some 300 miles on England’s dirty roads) into the woods. Damien Gabet, with whom I’m here to wild camp, is on a 1,000-mile journey in the shape of a Lucozade bottle as part of an anti-litter campaign, all the while removing as many plastic bottles as he can fit in his small orange trailer.
Beyond the wood is a field where the corn has been cut: a perfect spot, hidden from view, disturbing no one. Stars start to blink awake as we make our home for the night. Suddenly, the rumble of an engine – a silver Range Rover turns the corner. A familiar weariness grip me: I’m already resigned to being moved on, to take some stick for our trespass.
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The corporate-financed backlash to calls for global climate progress has been greatly empowered by the Trump administration. It’s never been more critical to challenge the misinformation that could turn a crisis into a catastrophe
Support the Guardian’s independent, fact-based journalism today
A little over a decade ago I published a book, This Changes Everything, which explored the reality of the climate crisis as a confrontation between capitalism and the planet. For a few years after the book came out, it seemed like we might just win a breakthrough. A cascade of large and militant mobilisations pressed the case for keeping warming below 1.5C as global calls for a green new deal grew louder and louder. Countries across the world announced long-term plans to reduce emissions and to hit net-zero targets; so did some of the largest corporations on the planet.
And then … well, we all know what happened. A corporate-financed backlash on all fronts. In the first 100 days of Trump’s second term, his administration took more than 140 actions to roll back environmental rules and push for greater use of fossil fuels. He signed executive orders to ease restrictions on their extraction and export, filled his cabinet with oil industry supporters, gutted federal agencies on the forefront of the climate crisis, and cancelled life-saving environmental justice projects.
Join George Monbiot and special guests on 16 September for a special climate assembly to discuss the growing and dramatic political and corporate threats to the planet. Book tickets – in person or livestream
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Exclusive: Leachate is tankered to treatment works where it mixes with sewage and industrial effluent
More than 750,000 tonnes of liquid from landfills are mixed with sewage at water treatment works and spread on farmland across England each year, it can be revealed.
Generated by hundreds of landfills across the country, leachate – the liquid that drains through landfill waste carrying a cocktail of chemicals – is regularly tankered to sewage treatment works, where it mixes with domestic sewage and industrial effluent to create sludge, also described as “biosolids”.
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Joint response by 25 bodies says proposals to speed up approval of new power plants weaken protection for public
A coalition of civil society groups is warning of the dangers of cutting safety regulations as the government pushes to “rip up the rules” to accelerate the construction of new nuclear power stations.
The 25 groups from communities neighbouring nuclear sites have submitted a joint response to a consultation by the nuclear regulatory taskforce, saying its proposals lack “both credibility and rigour”.
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Australia’s soon to be announced emissions reduction target for 2035 will say a lot about how Labor will prioritise dealing with the climate crisis
Progress on the climate crisis is often slow and frustrating. But sometimes, when people are given an opportunity, change can come in a rush.
On 1 July, the government introduced a subsidy scheme for small battery systems that reduces the cost for most households by about $4,000, or 30%. The response has been rapid. More than 1,000 batteries are being installed across the country each weekday.
Sign up to get climate and environment editor Adam Morton’s Clear Air column as a free newsletter
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A country plagued by power cuts has become the first to ban imports of petrol and diesel cars, as a new dam brings hopes of cheap green energy
When Deghareg Bekele, an architect in his early 30s, bought an Volkswagen electric car this year, he was a little sceptical. Not only is his home town, the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, prone to persistent power cuts, he also doubted the quality of his new vehicle.
Four months on, Deghareg is pleased with his purchase since he no longer has to endure long lines at the petrol pump, caused by Ethiopia’s chronic fuel shortages.
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In this week’s newsletter: a new Guardian documentary tells the story of a Rhode Island bird at risk, and what it takes to save a species
When you think about the climate crisis, Rhode Island in the United States is probably not the first place that springs to mind. But surprisingly, despite its mild climate, the state is one of the places where sea levels are rising at the fastest rates in the world.
For this week’s newsletter, I’d like to transport you to a serene ribbon of salt marsh there, to join the fight to save a species on the brink of extinction: the saltmarsh sparrow. Who is leading the fight? Septuagenarian and self-proclaimed “60s person”, Deirdre.
In the most untouched, pristine parts of the Amazon, birds are dying. Scientists may finally know why
Saving the world’s fattest parrot: can we vaccinate our rarest species before bird flu gets to them?
Collapsing bird numbers in North America prompt fears of ecological crisis – research
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