Climate

Living in an energy-efficient zero-carbon home with an air source heat pump has cut energy bills drastically

• Are heat pumps the future or just a lot of hot air?

This Monday, it will be two years since Julian and Juliette Rayner moved into their new zero-carbon home on a development about 20 minutes drive from Bristol.

The property boasts a range of new technologies that makes it highly energy-efficient and enable the couple to generate their own electricity and live a greener lifestyle.

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Supporters rally to Rachel Kyte after criticism of appointment over link to investment firm Quadrature Capital

The UK’s new climate envoy will retain her role on the board of a charity whose founders made a multimillion-pound donation to the Labour party and have investments in fossil fuels, the Guardian has learned.

Rachel Kyte, the former World Bank climate chief who was announced as the UK’s special representative on climate this week, is on the climate advisory board of Quadrature Climate Foundation, a charity set up by the founders of the Quadrature Capital investment company.

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September has offered little reprieve after a sweltering summer, with Las Vegas on 102nd day of temperatures above 100F

Brutal heat continues to plague the south-west US, with excessive heat alerts lingering long into September as parts of the region set grim new records for deaths connected to the sweltering temperatures.

Autumn has offered little reprieve for cities that have already spent months mired in triple-digit temperatures. This week, Las Vegas, Nevada; Phoenix, Arizona; and Palm Springs, California, are all grappling with severe weather, with highs that have pushed over 100F (38C). More than 16 million people in the US were under heat alerts on Friday, according to the National Weather Service, mostly clustered in the southern tips of Nevada, Arizona and California.

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More than the sheer repetition of extreme weather, the stakes have grown — for our homes, our communities and our lives.

The Middle East crisis, Russian drone attacks in Kyiv, Hurricane Helene and Paris fashion week: the last seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists

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From hurricanes to wildfires, a new generation of technologies could help utilities better plan for the risk of extreme weather to their electric grid.

A judge said he hoped to deter protests when he handed down lengthy terms for the two activists, who dumped soup on the painting in 2022. Later that day, activists did it again.

Storm made landfall in Florida Thursday and has caused deaths, damage and about 4m power outages in multiple states

• Hurricane Helene – live updates

Helene has reportedly killed at least 10 people and inflicted more than 4m power outages across the south-eastern US after crashing ashore in north-western Florida late on Thursday as a potent category 4 hurricane, according to officials.

The storm – which registered maximum sustained winds of 140mph – had weakened to a tropical storm over Georgia early on Friday, when residents whose communities experienced Helene’s peak effects more directly were only just beginning to fathom the recovery process ahead.

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Builders already have the tools needed to build cooler homes for an increasingly hotter world

The US sweltered under record-breaking heat this year, with new research suggesting that air conditioning is no longer enough to keep homes cool. Spiraling energy demands and costs of indoor cooling now have planners looking to alternative ways to keep buildings cool – some fresh out of the lab, others centuries old.

“The amount of buildings we expect to go up in the next couple decades is just staggering,” says Alexi Miller, director of building innovation at the non-profit New Buildings Institute (NBI). “If we build them the way we built them yesterday, we’re going to use a phenomenal amount of energy. There are lots of ways we could be doing this better. It’s not all fancy, emerging technology – there’s some basic stuff we don’t do nearly enough.”

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Environment has barely figured in leadership campaign but soon the party must decide where it stands

• UK politics live – latest updates

When the Conservatives gather in Birmingham this weekend for their first party conference out of government in 15 years, the environment is not likely to be top of most members’ minds, amid the fever of a leadership campaign.

That is probably a good thing, many green-tinged Tory insiders feel. The leadership campaign is dominated by the right wing of the party, with the favourite, Robert Jenrick, slugging it out on issues such as immigration, Brexit and the “scourge of woke” with Kemi Badenoch, James Cleverly and Tom Tugendhat.

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Climate activists opposed to the Mountain Valley pipeline were accused of breaking West Virginia’s new critical infrastructure law

• Revealed: how the fossil fuel industry helps spread anti-protest laws across the US

It was around dawn on a chilly day last November when West Virginia state troopers forcibly extricated Jerome Wagner out from a 25ft-deep pit where he was locked to a drilling machine being used to finish construction of a beleaguered gas pipeline.

The veteran climate activist was trying to draw attention to the Mountain Valley pipeline (MVP) – a 300-mile (480km) fossil fuel project mired by environmental controversies and blocked by court orders and regulatory red tape until it was pushed through by the Biden administration in mid-2023.

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Artificial intelligence’s hunger for energy has set off a boom in utility stocks and may lead to the reopening of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant, our columnist says.

There is little difference between this government’s and its Conservative predecessor’s policies on expansion

There seems to be no difference between Conservative and Labour policies on nuclear power. Both support the current building of Hinkley Point C in Somerset, the planned Sizewell C station in Suffolk, an unspecified number of small modular reactors all over Britain as well as the far-off dream of nuclear fusion.

However, few scientists serious about the threat of the climate crisis believe new nuclear power stations are part of the solution in reducing carbon output. Building them is too slow and costly, while solar and wind are quicker and cheaper in making a dent in fossil fuel consumption and eliminating it.

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Forecasters warn that storm, one of the most powerful to hit the US this year, could create a ‘nightmare’

• Tell us: have you been affected by Hurricane Helene?

Hurricane Helene strengthened to a catastrophic category 4 storm as it barreled toward Florida’s Gulf coast, making it one of the most powerful storms to hit the US this year.

The storm is expected to make landfall on Thursday night. Forecasters warn the enormous storm could create a “nightmare” scenario, with a potentially life-threatening storm surge that could reach 15-20ft (4.6-6.1 meters) in the Big Bend area of Florida’s Panhandle region.

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Catastrophic storms have crippled the state’s home insurance market in the past, and some researchers say it is dangerously vulnerable.

Around the country, people with a deep distrust of government want to preemptively ban the use of aerosols to reduce heat from the sun.

Catastrophic flooding is forecast in mountain areas and significant landslides are possible through Friday in parts of the Carolinas, Tennessee and Georgia.

The Times hosted leaders and policymakers to talk about growing threats of climate change, and spoke with the C.E.O. of Occidental Petroleum.

The stylish Populus hotel boasts eco-friendly construction and tree planting for every guest. Is this the hospitality of the future – or hot air?

Travelers to Denver, Colorado, will soon have the opportunity to spend the night in what promises to be “the first carbon positive hotel in America”. So say the creators behind Populus, a new 265-room, stylish, yet climate-conscious luxury hotel in the heart of the city.

Set to open in mid-October, the building is a striking addition to the city’s skyline – a sleek, three-corner structure built to resemble a grove of aspen trees, with each window shaped like the tree’s iconic “knots”. Its climate claims, too, are equally provocative. The hotel’s creators have promised to overcompensate for their emissions by a factor of 400% to 500%, through a combination of low-carbon construction, eco-friendly operations and a huge tree planting campaign throughout Colorado.

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Lobbyists and lawmakers have coordinated to enact new laws that increase criminal penalties for peaceful protests

Fossil fuel lobbyists coordinated with lawmakers behind the scenes and across state lines to push and shape laws that are escalating a crackdown on peaceful protests against oil and gas expansion, a new Guardian investigation reveals.

Records obtained by the Guardian show that lobbyists working for major North American oil and gas companies were key architects of anti-protest laws that increase penalties and could lead to non-violent environmental and climate activists being imprisoned up to 10 years.

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