The Guardian Climate Change

Louisiana State University allowed Shell to influence studies after a $25m donation and sought funds from other fossil fuel firms

• This story is co-published with the Lens, a non-profit newsroom in New Orleans

For $5m, Louisiana’s flagship university will let an oil company weigh in on faculty research activities. Or, for $100,000, a corporation can participate in a research study, with “robust” reviewing powers and access to all resulting intellectual property.

Those are the conditions outlined in a boilerplate document that Louisiana State University’s fundraising arm circulated to oil majors and chemical companies affiliated with the Louisiana Chemical Association, an industry lobbying group, according to emails disclosed in response to a public records request by the Lens.

Our climate is influenced not just by Pacific weather patterns but by the Indian and Southern oceans, as well as global heating trends

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The Bureau of Meteorology has declared the end of the 2023-24 El Niño event.

Since 1910, there have been 29 El Niños, a phase that sees easterly equatorial winds in the Pacific slow or even reverse. These increase the odds in eastern Australia for a dry winter into spring.

Chris Stark, head of the Climate Change Committee, says Tories’ decision to dilute key green policies has had huge diplomatic impact

Rishi Sunak has given up Britain’s reputation as a world leader in the fight against the climate crisis and has “set us back” by failing to prioritise the issue in the way his predecessors in No 10 did, the government’s green adviser has warned.

Chris Stark, the outgoing head of the Climate Change Committee (CCC), said that the prime minister had “clearly not” championed the issue following a high-profile speech last year in which he made a significant U-turn on the government’s climate commitments. The criticism comes after Sunak was accused of trying to avoid scrutiny of Britain’s climate policies by failing to appoint a new chair of the CCC.

Keir Starmer must learn from the Tories’ failures and ensure green projects are well planned and resourced

In the energetic pursuit of net zero, billions of pounds could be squandered needlessly. That’s the lesson from countries as diverse as Italy, the US and UK, where the rush to subsidise green projects suggests vast sums are at risk. Worse, they could be lining the pockets of multinational businesses and City financiers.

In the UK, 14 years of austerity has left the public sector struggling to make coherent, strategic decisions. When a decision is finally made, it is a panic measure that quickly unravels. The fallout could be that voters become disenchanted with green tech, especially if the dash for net zero leads to higher taxes and higher borrowing while early adopters unwittingly pay for costly mistakes.

Recordings of healthy fish are being transmitted to attract heat-tolerant larvae back to degraded reefs in the Maldives

An underwater experiment to restore coral reefs using a combination of “coral IVF” and recordings of fish noises could offer a “beacon of hope” to scientists who fear the fragile ecosystem is on the brink of collapse.

The experiment – a global collaboration between two teams of scientists who developed their innovative coral-saving techniques independently – has the potential to significantly increase the likelihood that coral will repopulate degraded reefs, they claim.

Green members demand meeting after Scottish government abandons pledge to cut emissions 75% by 2030

Scottish Greens are to hold a vote to determine the future of the party’s power-sharing agreement with the Scottish National party, after the government abandoned its pledge to cut carbon emissions 75% by 2030.

Members will be able to vote on whether their party should continue to cooperate with the SNP after the announcement on Thursday that the Scottish government was scrapping its key climate pledge.

The Green party MP on her stint as a chambermaid, a brush with the law and the importance of hairspray

Born in Worcestershire, Caroline Lucas, 63, studied at the University of Exeter where she gained a PhD in English. She joined the Green party in 1986 and went on to become leader in England and Wales from 2008 to 2012, and co-leader from 2016 to 2018. Since 2010 she has been MP for Brighton Pavilion, the UK’s first and only Green party MP. At the next election she plans to retire from parliament. Her new book, Another England: How to Reclaim Our National Story, has just been published. She is married with two sons.

When were you happiest?
Picnicking on the Downs with my family and dog – birds singing, sea sparkling, and mobile switched very firmly off.

War in Gaza, floods in Dubai, the knife attack in Sydney and the Grand National at Aintree: the last seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists

Warning: this gallery contains images that some readers may find distressing

Environmental groups say bosses should ‘hang their heads in shame’ as firm bows to pressure from shareholders to cut costs

Unilever is to scale back its environmental and social aims, provoking critics to say its board should “hang their heads in shame”.

The consumer goods company behind brands ranging from Dove beauty products to Ben & Jerry’s ice-cream was seen as perhaps the foremost proponent of corporate ethics – particularly under the tenure of its Dutch former boss Paul Polman.

Idea Angela Rawlings had a decade ago for Snæfellsjökull has snowballed into a full-blown campaign with a team of 50 people

Standing in the shadow of Iceland’s Snæfellsjökull, – a 700,000-year-old glacier perched on a volcano and visible to half the country’s population on any given day – in 2010, Angela Rawlings was struck by an unconventional thought.

“It suddenly just came to me. What if the glacier was president?” said Rawlings. It was a seemingly unorthodox way to push forward a movement that was already swiftly advancing; Ecuador had enshrined legal rights for nature while Māori in New Zealand were working to secure legal personhood for the Whanganui River.

Environmentalists celebrate new rules but Alaska politicians call it an ‘illegal’ attack on state’s livelihood and predict lawsuits

The Biden administration said on Friday it will restrict new oil and gas leasing on 13m acres (5.3m hectares) of a federal petroleum reserve in Alaska to help protect wildlife such as caribou and polar bears as the Arctic continues to warm.

The decision – part of an ongoing, years-long fight over whether and how to develop the vast oil resources in the state – finalizes protections first proposed last year as the Biden administration prepared to approve the controversial Willow oil project.

Exclusive: Study released at Cop28 misused research to underestimate impact of cutting meat eating, say academics

A flagship UN report on livestock emissions is facing calls for retraction from two key experts it cited who say that the paper “seriously distorted” their work.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) misused their research to underestimate the potential of reduced meat intake to cut agricultural emissions, according to a letter sent to the FAO by the two academics, which the Guardian has seen.

Estimated 2,548 barrels of carbon dioxide leaked from Exxon pipeline in Louisiana on 3 April, triggering alarm among residents

A major leak of CO2 from an ExxonMobil pipeline in Louisiana exposes dangerous safety gaps that should halt the planned multibillion-dollar carbon capture industry, environmental advocates say.

An estimated 2,548 barrels of carbon dioxide (CO2) leaked from the Exxon pipeline in Sulphur in Calcasieu Parish on 3 April, triggering an emergency response and alarm among residents who live in close proximity to scores of polluting pipelines, petrochemical and fossil fuel facilities.

Marcus Decker dared to protest on climate and was punished. Now he could be deported. Is that a humane democracy?

When the traditional ruling class was obliged to concede to demands for democracy, it gave away as little as possible. We could vote, but it ensured that crucial elements of the old system remained in place: the House of Lords, the first-past-the-post electoral system, prerogative powers and Henry VIII clauses, and above all a legal system massively and blatantly biased towards owners of property.

In combination, these elements ensured that the system remained predisposed to elite rule, even while it pretended the people were in charge. The portcullis excluding us from power has never been properly lifted since the Norman conquest. The relationship between rulers and ruled remains, in effect, a relationship between occupier and occupied.

Internal investigation under way but party has not announced that police have been called in

During questions in the Commons on next week’s business, Penny Mordaunt, leader of the house, said that MPs would debate the latest Lords amendments to the Rwanda bill on Monday and that, if necessary, time would also be set aside on Tuesday for MPs to vote again on Lords amendments to the bill.

But, at the No 10 lobby briefing, the PM’s spokesperson told journalists that the government wants to conclude the “ping pong” process (when the bill shuttles between the Commons and the Lords until both sides agree on its wording) on Monday night. He said:

Our intention is to get this passed on Monday such that we can then set out the timetable for getting flights off as soon as possible.

Climate campaigners complain of short-termism as country abandons target to cut carbon emissions by 75% by 2030

Climate campaigners have accused Scottish ministers of being “inept” and “short-termist” after they scrapped Scotland’s target to cut carbon emissions by 75% by 2030.

Màiri McAllan, the Scottish net zero secretary, confirmed her government had abandoned that target and would also drop legally binding annual targets on reducing carbon emissions, after damning criticism from a UK advisory committee.

Bill would stop private investors, including hedge funds, farmers and municipalities, from profiting off water scarcity

With private investors poised to profit from water scarcity in the west, US senator Elizabeth Warren and representative Ro Khanna are pursuing a bill to prohibit the trading of water as a commodity.

The lawmakers will introduce the bill on Thursday afternoon, the Guardian has learned. “Water is not a commodity for the rich and powerful to profit off of,” said Warren, the progressive Democrat from Massachusetts. “Representative Khanna and I are standing up to protect water from Wall Street speculation and ensure one of our most essential resources isn’t auctioned off to the highest bidder.”

Exclusive: By the middle of the century, pollution from plastic industry could ‘undermine world’s effort’ to control climate crisis

By the middle of the century, global emissions from plastic production could triple to account for one-fifth of the Earth’s remaining carbon budget, an analysis has found.

The stunning new estimates from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, published on Wednesday, provide yet more evidence that the plastic industry is “undermining the world’s efforts to address climate change”, said Heather McTeer Toney, executive director of the Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Beyond Petrochemicals campaign, which helped fund the new report.

Deaths from record temperatures in Mali reportedly led to full morgues turning away bodies this month

The deadly protracted heatwave that filled hospitals and mortuaries in the Sahel region of Africa earlier this month would have been impossible without human-caused climate disruption, a new analysis has revealed.

Mali registered the hottest day in its history on 3 April as temperatures hit 48.5C in the south-western city of Kayes. Intense heat continued across a wide area of the country for more than five days and nights, giving vulnerable people no time for recovery.

Passengers crowded around airline desks at Dubai international airport on Wednesday after major delays and cancellations caused by heavy rains.

The United Arab Emirates was hit by what the government described as the highest rainfall in the past 75 years. The rains began on Monday night, and by Tuesday evening the desert city of Dubai had received the average amount of rain it normally gets in a year.

Although the heavy rains had eased by late Tuesday, disruption was continuing on Wednesday, with Emirates airline suspending check-in for passengers departing from Dubai until midnight

• What the desert city of Dubai looks like after its biggest rainfall in 75 years – video