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Tougher laws said to be inspiring clandestine attacks on the ‘property and machinery’ of the fossil fuel economy
It was raining and the sparkling lights of the City of London shone back from the cold, wet pavement as two young men made their way through streets deserted save for a few police and private security. In the sleeping heart of the global financial system, they felt eyes on them from the city’s network of surveillance cameras, but hoped their disguise of high-vis vests and hoods hiding their faces would conceal them.
Reaching Lime Street, they stopped by a maintenance hole and looked around to make sure no one was watching. One took off the cover, located a bundle of black cables and started hacking away. Hours later, an email was circulated to news desks: “Internet cut off to hundreds of insurers in climate-motivated sabotage.”
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People in capital breathing much cleaner air, with significant improvements in capital’s most deprived areas
People in London have been breathing significantly cleaner air since the expansion of the ultra low emission zone (Ulez), a study has found.
Levels of deadly pollutants that are linked to a wide range of health problems – from cancer to impaired lung development, heart attacks to premature births – have dropped, with some of the biggest improvements coming in the capital’s most deprived areas.
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Council of Europe says Swiss government failing to respect human rights court’s ruling on emissions
The Swiss government has been told it must do more to show that its national climate plans are ambitious enough to comply with a landmark legal ruling.
The Council of Europe’s committee of ministers, in a meeting this week, decided that Switzerland was not doing enough to respect a decision last year by the European court of human rights that it must do more to cut its greenhouse gas emissions and rejected the government’s plea to close the case.
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Allendale, Northumberland:After catching the male’s courtship display, I spy their home – only a metre above the water
It’s early morning by the river and the frost is melting from the grass as the sun warms the back of my trousers. Cold doesn’t linger much at this time of year. The water is a deep black blue, though the sky is still pale. On the bend below the twisted Scots pine, its branches layered as in a Japanese garden, are a pair of dippers. His white chest flashes as he bobs up and down, stubby tail jerking with synchronicity.
I’ve been watching this pair for a few days now. Both sexes are almost identical, though the male dipper is slightly larger, but it’s their behaviour that makes it obvious who’s who. She’s standing on a rock, preening in a disinterested sort of way as if filing her nails, while he does an energetic dance, strands of nest material dangling from his beak.
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Judge says cofounder Roger Hallam’s term was ‘manifestly excessive’ as she cuts his and five other activists’ sentences
A lengthy jail sentence handed to the Just Stop Oil cofounder Roger Hallam was “manifestly excessive”, the country’s most senior judge has said, as she reduced his and five other climate protesters’ sentences on appeal.
Hallam was originally jailed for five years for conspiring to disrupt traffic by having protesters climb on to gantries over the M25 for four successive days in 2022. His sentence was reduced to four years.
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Government considering such a move over state-owned firm set up by Labour in June’s spending review, say reports
The UK government is reportedly weighing up the possibility of cutting planned funding for GB Energy, the state-owned company set up by Labour to drive renewable energy and cut household bills, in June’s spending review.
Cuts to the £8.3bn of taxpayer money promised over the five-year parliament would be another blow for Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, after he was overruled by the government when the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, backed the expansion of Heathrow’s third runway.
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Pencil pines grow for more than a thousand years each, and only in Tasmania. As lightning fires become more common, humans must mobilise to protect them – or lose these ancients forever
Steve Leonard finds it hard when he goes bushwalking in Tasmania’s high country these days. “I look at a stand of pencil pine and I wonder: ‘how long will you be there?’”
The ecologist is just back from a rapid survey of the cost to ancient trees of the latest lightning-strike fires across the island’s drying landscapes. Among the losses he found near the overland track, an alpine walking trail through central Tasmania, were groves of pencil pine.
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I loose the horses, the wild, red horses
I loose the horses, the mad, red horses
And terror is on the land.
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From the end of 2025 exporters will need to prove products sold in the EU have not come from land that has been deforested since December 2020
Beef farmer Glenn Morris only had to look up to know the world was changing.
During a heatwave in 1998, Morris stood on a cattle property in the New South Wales Hunter Valley and saw the trees cowering.
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A decade after Chinese investment, La Mosquitia’s processing plant is sitting idle and jobs have been lost as the climate crisis takes its toll
In 2014, Chinese investors visited La Mosquitia, a remote region in eastern Honduras. Amazed by the abundant jellyfish, they eagerly installed a processing plant to export the product to China, where they are served as a delicacy.
Encouraged by the new investments, local communities adopted jellyfish fishing, which quickly became a critical source of income. The trade provided economic benefits in an area with few jobs, increasing local incomes and building community resilience, despite concerns that large-scale jellyfish fishing can disturb marine ecosystems by disrupting food chains.
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Experts warn that cooling breaks and later kickoff times may be needed to cope with scorching temperatures when North America hosts the tournament
Over the course of a playing career that wound through Spain, Mexico and the sunbaked fields of Major League Soccer’s summers, American midfielder Tab Ramos was never hotter than at the 1994 World Cup in the United States.
The day before the United States men’s national team opened its tournament against Switzerland in the Pontiac Silverdome, it had been 99F (37C) in Michigan. By the 11.30am kickoff on matchday, the temperature reached 90F (32C) again. Worse still, the Silverdome was an NFL stadium designed for winter – to keep heat in, rather than out. The first World Cup match played indoors was conducted in a dome without air conditioning. On the field, the temperature reached 106F (41C). The grass laid over the artificial turf had been watered so eagerly that, with the sun beating down on the stadium’s fabric roof, the air turned soupy with humidity.
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