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Firm benefits from conflict to rake in $6.9bn as higher energy prices turbocharge profits
Shell has reported better than expected profits of $6.9bn (£5bn) after its oil traders reaped the benefits of soaring energy prices during the war in Iran, angering climate campaigners.
Europe’s biggest oil and gas company posted a 115% jump in first-quarter profits from the $3.2bn reported in the last three months of 2025.
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As Reform vows to block solar and windfarms, energy leaders say renewables offer most secure future, insulating UK from hostile forces
• May elections: What’s at stake across England, Wales and Scotland?
The defining issue of Thursday’s local elections, feedback from doorsteps suggests, will be the UK’s soaring cost of living. But voters should be told about the links between inflation and the effects of fossil fuels and the climate crisis – or the remedies they choose – may make the situation worse, green campaigners have warned.
Ami McCarthy, the head of politics at Greenpeace UK, said: “With people’s bills and prices soaring from yet another fossil fuel crisis, these local elections have a global context – driven by the Iran war.
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Approval for exploration in 70 new areas prompts fierce backlash from fossil fuel opponents
The Norwegian government has been heavily criticised for approving plans to reopen three North Sea gasfields nearly three decades after they were closed to help fill the gap in energy supplies created by the Middle East war.
Amid sharp price rises in oil and gas since the US and Israel’s attack on Iran in February, Oslo has also given its approval for oil and gas companies to explore in 70 new locations in the North Sea, Barents Sea and Norwegian Sea.
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Julie, once a circus elephant, and Kariba, from a Belgian zoo, are to be moved to a former ranch in Portugal
Europe’s first large-scale elephant sanctuary, which is opening to offer a more natural environment for some of the 600 animals still held in captivity across the continent, is to receive its first arrivals.
Julie, Portugal’s last circus elephant, will be moved next month to the animal charity Pangea’s multimillion pound sanctuary in the Alentejo, 200km (124 miles) east of Lisbon, close to the border with Spain.
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Powerful property and farming firm Grosvenor Group says knock-on effect of Iran war could arrive next year
Fertiliser shortages caused by the Iran war have driven up costs for UK farmers by up to 70% and will have a “dramatic” impact on food prices globally next year, according to one of Britain’s most powerful property and farming companies.
Mark Preston, executive trustee of the 349-year-old Grosvenor Group, controlled by the Duke of Westminster, said fertiliser “was already quite expensive” before the 50% to 70% surge in prices since the start of the Iran war in late February.
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Intervention for farming and flood risk changes the unique systems as communities grapple with how to live alongside the vital waterways
When British settlers started building Christchurch city 170 years ago, they largely ignored the nearby Waimakariri River, which twists from the South Island’s alps towards the eastern shore.
But rain and glacial shifts compelled the braided river – a globally rare form of river with many woven channels – to take on a new shape, occasionally flooding land and depositing tonnes of shingle in its wake.
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Inkpen, Berkshire: There is far less birdsong now than in Lillian Watts’s day, but it is down to her that there is any at all
Lillian Watts’s bench has fallen into disrepair, so instead I sit on Arthur’s Seat on the common. Warmth rises from the heath, even on this chilly spring morning, and a lizard creates curvaceous lines under the dry, still-dormant heather.
It is both Lillian’s and my birthday, though she died in 1989, aged 93. I play a recording of her from 1975, from the village’s history society. Poet, potter, English teacher, naturalist and formidable campaigner, she, along with villagers such as Arthur Cooke (1898-1980), saved this place from development. Lillian’s voice is measured, soft and annunciated, with the clipped vowels of her time.
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To celebrate Sir David Attenborough’s centenary, Madeleine Finlay catches up with natural history writer Patrick Barkham, who has met the celebrated presenter. They explore how the natural world has changed in the century that Attenborough has been on Earth, and how his programming has reflected his growing commitment to highlighting the devastating impacts of the climate crisis on nature and biodiversity
Clips: BBC, PBS
Support the Guardian: theguardian.com/sciencepod
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The author has become acutely aware of how the climate crisis is affecting women – and, in her new book, she argues that it’s time for mainstream western feminists to join the dots
Natasha Walter is halfway through explaining how she came to be politically radicalised when a young woman approaches the cafe table. We two middle-aged women look like “the most trustworthy people here,” she says, so could we watch her baby while she grabs a coffee? Like the solid citizen she is, Walter doesn’t take her eyes off the pushchair parked by the cafe steps for the next five minutes, though all we can see of the occupant is a tiny swinging foot. Sorry, where were we? Ah yes, the groundbreaking feminist writer who famously argued in her 1998 book The New Feminism that Margaret Thatcher had broken down barriers for women was explaining why she no longer really believes it’s possible to be rightwing and a feminist, as Theresa May or Amber Rudd insist they are.
“I can’t support just any woman getting into power, because I think a system that leaves too many women in the shadows – that condemns too many women to poverty or worse – is not a feminist system, and I don’t think you can call yourself a feminist if you’re going to prop up that system,” she says, eyes still glued to the baby for whom we are briefly responsible. “It’s not my kind of feminism.” Her younger self, she admits, would have thought her too uncompromising. But something in her seems to have hardened, facing a world she sees as threatened by the rise of far-right authoritarianism on one hand and a climate emergency on the other. “In the past I always wanted to be a broad church, I always thought any woman can be a feminist, but now I really am feeling … maybe I’ve been radicalised.”
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Group that worked with AOC and Bernie Sanders seeks to counter claim that climate policy is politically toxic
Americans do not care about the climate crisis, only economic issues: that’s the message some wonks have put forth in the past year, as the Trump administration has dismantled environmental protections. But the shift away from climate is misguided, an influential group of progressives is arguing.
“The climate crisis is a core driver of the cost-of-living crisis and instability we see across the economy,” says a new policy platform from left-leaning thinktank Climate and Community Institute (CCI).
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pub. Bowtie Press, UK, 2005
pub. Souvenir Press, London, 2002
First published by Henston Ltd, 1988, new edition 1994. Later edition published by Interpret Publishing, Dorking, Surrey UK.
pub. Henston, Guildford UK, 1985, revised 1987, 1988, 1994.
pub. Crossing Press CA 1994
