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Former Labour PM accused of ‘handing talking points’ to Tories and Reform after saying net zero strategy faltering
Climate experts and politicians have criticised Tony Blair for claiming any strategy that relied on rapidly phasing out fossil fuels was “doomed to fail”.
The former prime minister’s comments, published in a report from the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI), prompted an internal row within Labour, with some accusing him of playing into the hands of a narrative used by rightwing parties to delay climate action.
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Advertising Standards Authority says neither Lavazza UK nor Dualit’s product can be recycled at home
Descriptions of coffee pods as “compostable eco capsules” were misleading as they could not be composted at home, the Advertising Standards Authority has ruled.
The ASA has banned adverts by Lavazza UK and Dualit, which both made claims about the eco credentials of their coffee products.
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‘Huge volumes of chicken muck’ entering rivers are harmful to fish and plants, campaigners argue at Cardiff high court
Clean river campaigners have told a court that planning permission for a poultry megafarm in Shropshire is unlawful and should be overturned.
In the high court in Cardiff on Wednesday, Dr Alison Caffyn argued that the council had failed to take into account all the environmental impacts of the industrial chicken units, which will house 230,000 birds at any one time, in particular the effects of spreading manure on land.
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Corroboree frog belongs to 100m-year-old family of amphibians but is now found only in the puddles and peat bogs of Kosciuszko national park
Scientists have sequenced the genome of the critically endangered southern corroboree frog – one of Australia’s most threatened amphibians – in hope that the information could be used to aid its recovery.
The striking alpine frog, which has distinctive yellow and black markings, is so threatened by disease and the drying of its habitat due to climate change, that it is considered “functionally extinct”. The species survives in the temporary pools and peat bogs of Kosciuszko national park in New South Wales, with the help of zoo breeding and re-introduction programs.
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The scheme, part of policy blitz for local elections, will encourage councils and police forces to work together
Councils will be encouraged to work with police forces to seize and crush vehicles used by fly-tippers, in the latest phase of a government policy blitz before Thursday’s local elections.
Under a scheme being led by the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), new legislation will impose jail sentences of up to five years for people who illicitly transport waste in England.
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Temperatures south Asians dread each year arrive early as experts talk of ever shorter transition to summer-like heat
The summer conditions south Asian countries dread each year have arrived alarmingly early, and it’s only April. Much of India and Pakistan is already sweltering in heatwave conditions, in what scientists say is fast becoming the “new normal”.
Temperatures in the region typically climb through May, peaking in June before the monsoon brings relief. But this year, the heat has come early. “As far as Asia and the Indian subcontinent are concerned, there was a quick transition from a short window of spring conditions to summer-like heat,” said GP Sharma, the meteorology president of Skymet, India’s leading private forecaster.
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The plastic particles are everywhere – here’s what to know about what to avoid, whether they ever leave the body and what to do about plastic pollution
Microplastics are tiny particles of plastic.
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Joshua Bonnetta spent 8,760 hours recording a pine – then honed it down into a four-hour album full of creatures, cracking branches and quite possibly the sound of leaves growing
What does a landscape sound like when it’s not being listened to? This philosophical question was a catalyst for film-maker and artist Joshua Bonnetta, who has distilled a year of recordings from a single tree in upstate New York – that’s 8,760 hours – into a four-hour album, The Pines. As Robert Macfarlane writes in his accompanying essay, The Pines is a reminder of the natural world’s “sheer, miraculous busyness”, its “froth of signals and noise”. It is rich with poetic meaning, and resonant amid the climate emergency.
“It started as a personal thing,” Bonnetta explains from his studio in Munich, where he relocated from the US in 2022. For over 20 years he has made sonic records of places as private mementos, but recent experiments with long-form field recording led him to push himself “to document this place in the deepest way I could”. On a residency in the Outer Hebrides between 2017 and 2019, Bonnetta made the sound installation Brackish, a month-long continuous radio broadcast from a weather-resistant hydrophone – an underwater mic – by a loch. “I started to leave the recorder for a day or two, then it just got longer,” he says. “Amazing things happen when you’re not there to interfere … This allows you a different, very privileged window into the space.”
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Climate experts say warming atmosphere from climate change could fuel severe freezing rain and ice storms like the one that hit the upper midwest last month
Winter has been slow to release its icy grip from the upper midwest this year, and in northern Michigan, its effects will be keenly felt for months, perhaps years.
A devastating ice storm that hit late last month has left an estimated 3m acres of trees snapped in half or damaged from the weight of up to an inch-and-a-half of ice across the northern part of lower Michigan.
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Charity shops won’t take them. Councils incinerate them. Retailers dump them on the global south. We’re running out of ideas on how to deal with our used clothes – and the rag mountain just keeps growing
In February, a threadbare polycotton bedsheet landed on the desk of Simon Roberts, CEO of Sainsbury’s. A “protest by post”, it had been sent by the Sheffield-based designer, maker and eco activist Wendy Ward. “I purchased this from Sainsbury’s at least 10 years ago,” she wrote in the accompanying letter. “It has served me well. However, I have no sustainable options available for what I should do with it.” Beyond repair, it was too damaged to donate to a charity shop, she explained. She couldn’t compost it as it had been blended with polyester, and she couldn’t repurpose it as cleaning cloths, as, being polycotton, it wasn’t absorbent. And, she added, “I don’t want to put it into a textile recycling collection as the likelihood is that it will be shipped overseas or incinerated and not recycled.” Ward qualified her assertions with links to respected sources – as a sustainable fashion PhD student, she is well informed on such matters.
“The only action I can personally take,” she continued, “is to put it into my general waste bin. I don’t want to do this, as in Sheffield all general waste is incinerated as ‘energy recovery’. This isn’t a sustainable option as such processes have been shown to be as damaging to local air pollution as burning coal.” So, she concluded, “as Sainsbury’s is responsible for designing and manufacturing this product, making decisions to use polycotton with no consideration for what could be done once it reaches the end of its life, I have decided to return it to you. I would really love to hear what you decide to do with it.”
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