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Poorer households shut out of heat pump market and grants should be increased to speed up rollout, thinktank says
Gas boiler fittings outnumbered new heat pump installations by more than 15 to one last year, and only one in eight new homes were equipped with the low-carbon alternative despite the government’s clean energy targets.
Poorer households are also being shut out of the heat pump market as the grants available are inadequate and should be increased, according to a report by the Resolution Foundation thinktank.
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Scientists say a complex mix of factors are making seasonal allergies worse for longer in many parts of the world – but why is it happening and is it here to stay?
The first time it happened, László Makra thought he had flu. The symptoms appeared from nowhere at the end of summer in 1989: his eyes started streaming, his throat was tight and he could not stop sneezing. Makra was 37 and otherwise fit and healthy, a mid-career climate scientist in Szeged, Hungary. Winter eventually came and he thought little of it. Then, it happened the next year. And the next.
“I had never had these symptoms before. It was high summer: it was impossible to have the flu three consecutive years in a row,” he says.
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John Todd’s eco-machine stunned experts by using natural organisms to remove toxic waste from a Cape Cod lagoon. Forty years on, he wants to build a fleet of them to clean up the oceans
John Todd remembers the moment he knew he was really on to something: “There was no question that it was at the Harwich dump in 1986,” he recalls. This was in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, close to where Todd still lives. Hidden away from the picturesque beaches was the town landfill, including lagoons of toxic waste from septic tanks, which was being left to seep into the groundwater below. So Todd, then a 45-year-old biologist, decided to design a solution. What he was “on to”, he came to realise, was not just a natural way of removing pollution from water, it was a holistic approach to environmental restoration that was way ahead of its time, and possibly still is.
An early eco-machine purifying toxic waste on Cape Cod in 1986. Photograph: John Todd
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Nasa cuts contract that convened USGCRP, which released assessments impacting environmental decision-making
The White House is ending funding for the body that produces the federal government’s pre-eminent climate report, which summarizes the impacts of rising global temperatures on the United States.
Every four years, the US Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) is required by Congress to release a new national climate assessment to ensure leaders understand the drivers of – and threats posed by – global warming. It is the most comprehensive, far-reaching and up-to-date analysis of the climate crisis, playing a key role in local and national decision making about agriculture, energy production, and land and water use.
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The IEA forecast indicates a sharp rise in the requirements of AI, but said threat to the climate was ‘overstated’
The global rush to AI technology will require almost as much energy by the end of this decade as Japan uses today, but only about half of the demand is likely to be met from renewable sources.
Processing data, mainly for AI, will consume more electricity in the US alone by 2030 than manufacturing steel, cement, chemicals and all other energy-intensive goods combined, according to a report from the International Energy Agency (IEA).
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Dartington, Devon: It’s been 13 years since I was last on the roof of this 14th-century longhouse, and neither of us are as we were
An easterly breeze is knocking the heat out of the April sun as I hitch a bundle of hazel sticks on to my shoulder. As I climb the ladder, I can hear the inch of lichen beneath it crunching like dried seaweed. I’m thatching the Cott Inn, a Devon longhouse, and it’s a noteworthy moment as, after 13 years of thatching, I’m back at the first roof I worked on as an apprentice.
I am using wheat for the ridge, a variety called Triticale grown specifically for thatching. This year, thatching wheat is in desperately short supply after waterlogged fields last winter and a wet harvest. Fortunately – given the shortage – I am not rethatching the whole roof of the Cott, just replacing the ridge (the capping on the top), which wears most quickly as it bears the brunt of the weather.
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Guardian Australia is highlighting the plight of our endangered native species during an election campaign that is ignoring broken environment laws and rapidly declining ecosystems
Australia’s most skilled aerial mammal, the yellow-bellied glider, is on an “inexorable slide” to extinction as global heating creates more extreme bushfires that are robbing the species of the food and tree hollows it relies on to survive.
Thanks to large parachutes of skin stretching from their wrists to their ankles, yellow-bellied gliders can travel up to 140 metres in a single jump, the furthest of any Australian mammal, including the larger and better known endangered greater glider.
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Black-tailed godwits’ scientific name means ‘muddy muddy’, a moniker that doesn’t do justice to their elegance
When the tide is out on my Somerset coastal patch, there’s so much mud it looks as if you could walk all the way across the bay to Wales.
That seemed apt when I came across a flock of black-tailed godwits, whose scientific name, Limosa limosa, literally means “muddy muddy”. The name seems inappropriate for such an elegant bird, although their long legs do allow them to feed in the muddiest places.
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Guardian Australia is highlighting the plight of our endangered native species during an election campaign that is ignoring broken environment laws and rapidly declining ecosystems
The bogong moth was once so abundant it was mistaken for weather. During Sydney’s Olympic Games in 2000, a swarm of bogong moths attracted by stadium lights was so huge that meteorologists mistook it for a rain cloud.
But the species known as “deberra” in Taungurung language – an insect with deep cultural and ecological importance, but which is smaller and lighter than a paperclip – has not returned to those numbers since the population collapsed by up to 99.5% in the two years before 2019.
Get Guardian Australia environment editor Adam Morton’s Clear Air column as an email
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More than 900 young people tell Guardian Australia they worry about money, housing and healthcare – and feel a sense of dread about the climate emergency, social cohesion and rise of the far right
“There is a general sense – it sounds melodramatic – of, well, the world is ending, we have no way to deal with that, so we are just going to get on with life,” Axel says.
The 25-year-old is describing a feeling shared by his friends in their mid-20s.
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pub. Verso, London, New York, 2012
pub. Random House, 2006
