Climate

Advocates vow to sue, saying plan, crucial to Biden’s clean energy agenda, will drive Tiehm’s buckwheat to extinction

For the first time under Joe Biden, a federal permit for a new lithium mine has been approved for a Nevada project essential to his clean energy agenda, despite conservationists’ vows to sue over the plan, which they say will drive an endangered wildflower to extinction.

Ioneer Ltd’s mine will help expedite production of a key mineral in the manufacturing of batteries for electric vehicles at the center of the president’s push to cut greenhouse gas emissions, administration officials said Thursday in Reno.

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In recent decades, fast-growing blazes were responsible for an outsize share of fire-related devastation, scientists found using satellite data.

Altering the DNA of living organisms could be an early step in re-engineering the natural world to help curb climate change.

Leaders are eager to fill us with positivity, but research shows people in distress are more likely to take collective action

If despair is the most unforgivable sin, then hope is surely the most abused virtue. That observation feels particularly apposite as we enter the Cop season, that time of United Nations megaconferences at the end of every year, when national leaders feel obliged to convince us the future will be better, despite growing evidence to the contrary.

Climate instability and nature extinction are making the Earth an uglier, riskier and more uncertain place, desiccating water supplies, driving up the price of food, displacing humans and non-humans, battering cities and ecosystems with ever fiercer storms, floods, heatwaves, droughts and forest fires. Still worse could be in store as we approach or pass a series of dangerous tipping points for Amazon rainforest dieback, ocean circulation breakdown, ice-cap collapse and other unimaginably horrible, but ever more possible, catastrophes.

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King Charles III took part in a traditional kava-drinking ceremony before a line of bare-chested, heavily tattooed Samoans and was declared a 'high chief' of the Pacific island nation. The British monarch is on an 11-day tour of Australia and Samoa – the first major trip overseas since his cancer diagnosis earlier this year. The peppery, slightly intoxicating root drink is a key part of Pacific culture and is known locally as 'ava'. Australia’s former deputy prime minister was hospitalised after mistakenly drinking too much of a local brew at a similar ceremony in Micronesia in 2022. The royal couple later visited the village of Moata’a, where Charles was made 'Tui Taumeasina', or high chief

• King Charles becomes Samoan ‘high chief’ and drinks narcotic kava at welcoming ceremony

• Selfies, hugs and protests: King Charles’s new approach in spotlight during ‘fast and furious’ royal tour of Australia

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Means to stop catastrophic global heating exist, says UN chief, but political courage is needed to end world’s fossil fuel addiction

The huge cuts in carbon emissions now needed to end the climate crisis mean it is “crunch time for real”, according to the UN’s environment chief.

An unprecedented global mobilisation of renewable energy, forest protection and other measures is needed to steer the world off the current path towards a catastrophic temperature rise of 3.1C, a report from the UN environment programme (Unep) has found. Extreme heatwaves, storms, droughts and floods are already ravaging communities with less than 1.5C of global heating to date.

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An annual assessment by the world body tracks the gulf between what countries have vowed to do and what they’ve actually achieved.

Pace of growth helps maintain renewable energy when weather conditions interfere with wind and solar

Faced with worsening climate-driven disasters and an electricity grid increasingly supplied by intermittent renewables, the US is rapidly installing huge batteries that are already starting to help prevent power blackouts.

From barely anything just a few years ago, the US is now adding utility-scale batteries at a dizzying pace, having installed more than 20 gigawatts of battery capacity to the electric grid, with 5GW of this occurring just in the first seven months of this year, according to the federal Energy Information Administration (EIA).

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Mi momento viral reveló una experiencia compartida de ansiedad climática entre generaciones. Es hora de que la canalicemos hacia la acción.

When it comes to the climate crisis, sometimes feelings are as important as facts, even for meteorologists.

Much of the food we eat is grown with synthetic fertilizer, which is a huge source of climate change. But now, a seed with DNA-modified bacteria is reducing the amount of synthetic fertilizer that farmers have to apply to their fields. Eric Lipton, an investigative reporter for The New York Times, explains.

By tweaking the DNA of bacteria, scientists aim to cut the use of chemical fertilizers that are worsening global warming. Some worry about unintended consequences.

Even temporarily passing the Paris 2015 limit will mean severe storms, heatwaves and floods

In 2015, world leaders in Paris put great hope in keeping the rise in average global temperatures at or below 1.5C. But global temperatures continue rising relentlessly. The world is now on the brink of overshooting the 1.5C target, and then – what? The hope was to stop pumping out CO2 and also remove it from the atmosphere to avoid a cataclysm, but that would need 400 gigatonnes of CO2 to be removed by 2100, using new and as yet untested technology on a vast and economical scale.

A recent report shows that even temporarily overshooting 1.5C will still allow climate change to build up over the next several decades. And that means severe storms, intense heatwaves, deluges of rain and many other disastrous outcomes will carry on increasing.

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No wonder some members of the Commonwealth heads of government meeting had that sinking feeling

• See more of Fiona Katauskas’s cartoons here

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The electric car company said profits climbed 17 percent in the third quarter as strong sales of energy products helped to make up for relatively slow auto sales.

Robert Buckland, the former justice secretary, says ex-president ‘not fit for office’

The Labour party has put out a statement rejecting allegations that it broke US election law because activists and staff members have been volunteering to help the Democrats.

A Labour spokesperson said:

It is common practice for campaigners of all political persuasions from around the world to volunteer in US elections.

Where Labour activists take part, they do so at their own expense, in accordance with the laws and rules.

We said that because working people had already paid the burden under the last government, we wouldn’t increase the taxes, the main taxes that working people pay, so income tax - all rates - national insurance and VAT. So those taxes that working people pay, we’re not increasing those taxes in the budget.

We go into this budget with a number of challenges - the £22bn black hole just this year, in the public finances, the unfinanced company compensation schemes, for example on infected blood and Horizon, it’s really important that we honour but they weren’t in the forecasts from the previous government.

The fact that the previous government had baked in austerity to our public spending settlements in the years to come, and we committed to not return to austerity.

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With no power, no water and soon-to-spoil food, Asheville residents fired up their grills and emptied their freezers for communal meals

Erin Kellem’s Asheville, North Carolina neighborhood is a short drive from the city center, but feels remote. The Haw Creek area’s culs-de-sac are fronted by spacious yards and surrounded by thick woods that give the illusion of isolation.

Hurricane Helene changed that, dropping an ocean of rain on the southern Appalachian mountains. Floods of biblical proportions killed dozens. Power outages left thousands without electricity for at least two weeks in most places. There was no gas or cellphone service for days following the storm, and most of the city is still without potable water. Roads disappeared under rushing water and mud. The help that was on its way had no way in, and those stranded in their homes had no way of checking on loved ones.

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Residents of Las Vegas have endured a string of record-breaking heatwaves in summer with a very warm fall

By now, the canvassers at Make the Road Nevada know how to prepare themselves for the record-breaking heat.

Members of the progressive group – which focuses on mobilising Black and Latino voters – layer on white, UPF-protective shirts, and sweat-wicking performance wear. They fill their 50-quart coolers with ice-cold water. And they pack lots and lots of chips – barbecue Lays, and Cheetos and Doritos – for the road. The salt helps stave off dehydration.

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US readers are responding to the reality of the climate crisis by adapting their homes, from insulation as a refuge from heat to removing yard debris in case of wildfires

Rose, 62, was living in a remote area of Washington, west of Seattle, when the scorching “heat dome” of 2021 hit the Pacific north-west. As the house Rose shared with her then 93-year-old mother grew hotter, and their two air conditioning units struggled to make any dent on the wall of heat, Rose’s heart rate climbed, and she watched as all the rubber bands in the house liquefied.

The heat dome – which broke local records to reach highs of 120F (49C) – buckled roads, melted electrical cables and caused about 600 excess deaths, and research showed it was “virtually impossible” without climate change. It’s just one example of a worsening picture for US extreme weather driven by human caused global heating: including more frequent hurricanes, wildfires and devastating floods.

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Danish political scientist Bjorn Lomborg told the US cable host its biggest threat was not the climate crisis, but do his claims stack up?

• Great Barrier Reef’s worst bleaching leaves giant coral graveyard: ‘It looks as if it has been carpet bombed’
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Instead of an existential crisis for species worldwide, or threatening to submerge entire Pacific nations and coastal cities where hundreds of millions of people live, or a phenomenon driving unprecedented heatwaves and wildfires, the climate crisis was characterised somewhat differently on major US cable show Real Time with Bill Maher.

Climate change was “a problem”, Danish political scientist Bjorn Lomborg told comedian Maher, but would only shave a few percentage points off global GDP by the end of the century and in any case, he claimed, by then people would be much richer anyway.

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