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Former PM claims net zero policies losing public support and says there should be greater focus on carbon capture
Tony Blair has called for the government to change course on climate, suggesting a strategy that limits fossil fuels in the short term or encourages people to limit consumption is “doomed to fail”.
In comments that have prompted a backlash within Labour, the former prime minister suggested the UK government should focus less on renewables and more on technological solutions such as carbon capture.
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The countries boast high levels of wind and solar on their grids, leading to speculation about the robustness of the technology
Spain and Portugal suffered the worst blackout in living memory in Europe this week. About 55 million people were affected and it lasted more than half a day. Some have blamed renewables and net zero emissions targets, as the two countries boast high levels of wind and solar on their electricity grid and lead Europe in the technologies. But is this true?
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IET report says running cables below ground about four and a half times more expensive than overhead lines
Labour has vowed to press ahead with its plans to build more pylons across England and Wales, a subject of local political division, as a report says underground electricity cables are more than four times more expensive than overhead lines.
Pylons have become one of the key electoral issues in a number of counties including Lincolnshire, which is a local election battleground this week. Reform and the Conservatives have called for electricity cables to be buried underground rather than carried overhead by pylons.
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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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Party hopes ‘green patriotism’ will help it win seats in true-blue areas such as Wiltshire in this week’s local elections
With its thatched cottages and patchwork fields, Wiltshire is a traditional true-blue Tory heartland; its county council is always dominated by Conservatives.
But this week, the Greens think they stand a good chance of winning their first seats on the council because people are so fed up with the main parties.
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British defence firms have reportedly warned staff not to connect their phones to Chinese-made EVs
Mobile phones and desktop computers are longstanding targets for cyber spies – but how vulnerable are electric cars?
On Monday the i newspaper claimed that British defence firms working for the UK government have warned staff against connecting or pairing their phones with Chinese-made electric cars, due to fears that Beijing could extract sensitive data from the devices.
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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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Scientists on Union glacier in Antarctica fear the region is reaching a dangerous tipping point
• Words and photographs by James Whitlow Delano
Every time Dr Ricardo Jaña crosses the turbulent seas that separate Chile from Antarctica, it feels like his first time. The glaciologist at the Chilean Antarctic Institute (Inach) has sailed each year for 12 years through the Drake Passage, where the prevailing westerly winds, unimpeded by any land mass, raise the waters in chaotic waves that lash his boat.
“I feel powerless and resigned to the forces of nature,” says Jaña, who is the research chief at the Union Glacier Joint Scientific Polar Station.
Jaña skis around the glacier making global navigation satellite system measurements
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1,000 tonnes of dog waste hits the ground daily in the UK – how can we reduce its environmental impact? Scientists weigh up the best options, from flicking it into the undergrowth to reusing newspapers
When Laura Young got Cooper the cavapoo in 2020, she knew that single-use plastic poo bags weren’t going to cut it. “Having a dog is a lifestyle extra,” says the 28-year-old environmental scientist. “I was aware that I wanted to try not having a negative environmental impact.” But where to start? The shelves seemed to be divided into two camps: bog-standard, single-use plastic wisps, and shiny, expensive bags brandishing eco buzzwords. “I was conscious that compostable bags weren’t the solution,” says Young. “But initially that’s all I could find and so that’s what I bought.”
Often marketed as biodegradable, compostable or made from an alternative material such as cornstarch, they promise a more environmentally friendly option than single-use plastic. (Plastic poo bags, frequently made from low-density polyethylene, will sweat in landfill for thousands of years, breaking down into harmful microplastics and releasing climate-warming methane as they go.)
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