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Phasing out fossil fuels ‘doomed to fail’, says Tony Blair as he calls for rethink of net zero policy – as it happened
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Severin Carrell is the Guardian’s Scotland editor.
Keir Starmer is not expected to campaign in the Hamilton byelection, a critical contest for Scottish Labour which takes place in early June, Anas Sarwar has confirmed.
I wouldn’t expect Keir to be campaigning in the byelection. That’s not to say he won’t, but I’m not expecting Kier to campaign in the byelection.
I’ll be on the stump campaigning for a Labour win. I’m the candidate for first minister next year. I’m the one that wants to remove the SNP from government.
Next year, we’ve got to demonstrate to people that for all Nigel Farage might want to come here with his easy answers and create a bit of a circus, the reality is a vote for Reform only helps the SNP. If you want to get rid of the SNP, only Scottish Labour can beat them.
Continue reading...Trump dismisses contributors to key US report on climate crisis preparedness
The assessment, mandated by Congress, is used by federal and local governments to prep for climate disasters
Donald Trump’s administration has dismissed all contributors to the US government’s flagship study on how to prepare for climate change impacts, prompting strong criticism from experts over a “senseless” move.
The climate assessment is used by federal and local governments to understand how to prepare for climate crisis impacts including from extreme heat, hurricanes, flooding and drought.
Continue reading...Trump’s 100 Days of Upending Climate Policy
Climate crisis could kill off Australian music festivals, report warns
Exclusive: As they wait on latest weather forecasts, concertgoers delay buying tickets. But this has caused some major events to cancel
Music festivals are a threatened species that could die out if they fail to adapt to the climate crisis.
While soaring insurance and production costs, disruptions to supply chains, mass cancellations and shifts in consumer buying habits have all contributed to a flailing live music scene, extreme and unpredictable weather is an underlying contributor to these factors, an RMIT University report has found.
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Continue reading...President Trump’s 100 Days of Federal Housing Policy Chaos
The chaos by design of the most recent Trump administration’s first one hundred days hasn’t spared any part of government. Here are some of the biggest ways layoffs, agency dismantling and overreaching executive orders have impacted the US housing system.
Firings at HUD and fair housing rollbacksAs part of DOGE’s assault on the federal workforce, there have been careless layoffs at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)—the federal agency dedicated to addressing housing, homelessness, community development, and long-term disaster recovery. In previous blogposts, I’ve highlighted the importance of HUD and its role in advancing affordable, climate resilient housing.
More HUD layoffs and regional office closures are anticipated in the coming weeks and will impact the agency’s ability to manage programs like Federal Housing Administration (FHA) mortgage underwriting and Community Development Block Grants that cities, counties, and states rely on to support affordable housing, economic development programming, and disaster recovery.
President Trump’s recent executive order (EO) on “restoring equality” is a stepping stone to Project 2025’s goal of repealing the Fair Housing Act. The order contradicts a 2015 Supreme Court ruling and calls for federal agencies to ignore the disparate impact standard—a key legal principle for the civil rights movement that has helped fight discrimination in housing and employment in cases that may at first appear neutral but have a practically significant impact on people based on their race, sex, disability, or other protected trait.
In a country where discrimination has touched millions of lives and shaped cities, climate risk, and disaster recovery, this EO is an ominous rejection of basic historical facts with serious consequences for our future. As the Alliance for Housing Justice notes, this EO is an unconstitutional “greenlight to discriminate at scale—putting people’s homes and lives at risk.”
Taking housing out of federal homelessness strategyThe US Interagency Council on Homelessness (USICH) is a small federal agency dedicated to preventing and ending homelessness through coordination across federal departments. In September 2024, USICH released the first ever federal homelessness prevention framework rooted in public health principles and the Housing First model.
In March 2025, President Trump, via DOGE, effectively dismantled USICH. At a time of record homelessness and economic uncertainty, President Trump’s dismantling of USICH clears the way for his strategy to address homelessness through development of privately operated tent cities.
Hanging community development financial institutions out to dryCommunity Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs) are an important part of America’s under-resourced affordable housing ecosystem. In a nutshell, CDFIs are lenders that provide both investment capital and technical support for communities and projects that the mainstream financial system can’t or won’t serve. CDFIs help finance affordable housing construction and preservation, community development, and climate solutions. Tariffs levied by the Trump administration have further complicated the financing of housing construction and are anticipated to add 9,200 dollars to the average price of a newly constructed home.
On March 25th, President Trump ordered the dismantling of the CDFI Fund, a department created in 1994 through bipartisan legislation by stripping back its activity to only what was statutorily required. This mirrors the administration’s strategy with other agencies. Through one of its largest programs, the New Market Tax Credit, the CDFI fund has allocated 81 billion dollars. While the New Market Tax Credit is not without its criticisms, the program is important in that it represents a “direct effort to reverse the impacts of past discriminatory legal frameworks.” Attacks on the CDFI Fund should be understood as part of the administration’s fealty to corporate interests—and the push to sell public lands for real estate development as a false solution to the housing crisis.
What to expect next?In the next 100 days and beyond, as we enter a Danger Season of climate-fueled extreme weather that destroys homes and wreaks havoc on household finances, the harmful impacts of all the cuts we’ve seen to date will become ever clearer. We should also expect more dangerous executive orders and for the Trump administration to continue to ignore court rulings that don’t serve its political agenda. We should also expect to see the continued politicization of disaster response, including making aid harder to access.
Congress must push back against these and other egregious actions and should not rubber stamp a budget that puts housing justice and shared prosperity further out of reach.
No matter what the next hundred days and beyond bring, the housing crisis isn’t going anywhere. While chaos reigns on the federal level, cities and states must forge ahead to build and preserve meaningfully affordable and climate resilient housing on the ground and advance housing rights.
Climate plan based on phasing out fossil fuels doomed to fail, says Tony Blair
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.
Continue reading...Why effects of Michigan’s ice storm will linger for months, perhaps years
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.
Continue reading...‘Last chance for humanity’: the cold reality of monitoring global heating on a glacier
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
Continue reading...National Climate Assessment Authors Are Dismissed by Trump Administration
Trump’s first 100 days supercharged a global ‘freefall of rights’, says Amnesty
World now in era of repressive regimes’ impunity, climate inaction and unchecked corporate power, says report
The first 100 days of Donald Trump’s presidency have “supercharged” a global rollback of human rights, pushing the world towards an authoritarian era defined by impunity and unchecked corporate power, Amnesty International warns today.
In its annual report on the state of human rights in 150 countries, the organisation said the immediate ramifications of Trump’s second term had been the undermining of decades of progress and the emboldening of authoritarian leaders.
Continue reading...E.P.A. Says It Will Tackle ‘Forever Chemicals.’ Details Are Sparse.
‘Exploitative’ contracts and hazardous conditions: life for some of the immigrants cleaning up wildfire-stricken LA
Advocates say workers risk their health and fear speaking out about conditions amid Trump’s immigration crackdown
On a sunny day in February three workers swept up the piles of ash left behind on an Altadena driveway from when the Eaton fire raged through the Los Angeles neighborhood the month before.
The flames of the blaze had consumed nearly every home on the street, leaving only brick chimneys and charred vehicles. Red signs at the entrances of properties warned in English: “Unsafe, do not enter or occupy … entry may result in death or injury.” Hazards such as lead paint, asbestos and batteries were strewn amongst the ashes, but few workers cleaning the neighborhood that day wore masks or other personal protective equipment (PPE).
Continue reading...Hello freedom fans! Ian the climate denialist potato is back – the REAL enemy is renewables! | First Dog on the Moon
These days they call him Ian the renewable energy is expensive potato
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Monday briefing: As Just Stop Oil disbands, how will we remember the radical climate activist group?
In today’s newsletter: Notorious for its disruptive protests, the group’s radical tactics may be best known as a turning point in climate resistance
Good morning.
This weekend Just Stop Oil put down their soup cans, hung up their hi-vis and disbanded, saying that now the UK government had stopped extracting oil and gas from the North Sea, they had achieved what they set out to do back in 2022.
Ukraine | US President Donald Trump has said he thinks Volodymyr Zelenskyy is ready to give up Crimea, despite his Ukrainian counterpart’s previous assertions on the Black Sea peninsula annexed by Russia in 2014.
Canada | The suspect in a car-ramming attack that killed 11 people and injured dozens at a Filipino heritage festival in the Canadian city of Vancouver has been charged with eight counts of second degree murder, prosecutors have said.
UK economy | UK banks’ earnings reports will be studied this week for signs of turmoil linked to Donald Trump’s tariff drama, with uncertainty over global growth likely to weigh on lenders with heavy exposure to China, including HSBC.
Politics | The Liberal Democrats have publicly challenged Nigel Farage to give details of his party’s donations after calculating that Reform UK spent more than £2m on personalised letters to postal voters before the local elections.
Health | Consuming large amounts of ultra-processed food (UPF) increases the risk of an early death, according to a international study that has reignited calls for a crackdown on UPF.
Continue reading...The toxins around us threaten our fertility. Black families face an outsize risk
My fear growing up was gun violence. But a bigger threat to my body may have come from an invisible villain
Everyone experiences a moment that shapes who they are – a moment when childhood innocence is lost, and the burdens and traumas of the world become clearer.
For me, that moment occurred in elementary school when my friend discovered a gun in Englewood, New Jersey’s Denning Park. For days, I worried about what might be lurking behind the trees and in the shadows. This anxiety lingered through high school; I even wrote in my local newspaper that “I couldn’t remember anything more frightening for a young girl in elementary school”.
Continue reading...Trump order to loosen fishing regulations poses major risks, experts warn
Conservationists fear fallout from president’s proclamation on fishing in federally protected area of Pacific Ocean
Environmental conservation groups are expressing major concerns over Donald Trump’s recent proclamation to reverse fishing regulations across the Pacific Islands Heritage Marine national monument, a federally protected area in the central Pacific Ocean spanning nearly 500,000 sq miles.
As one of the most pristine tropical marine environments in the world, the monument is now at risk following Trump’s decision last week to unleash American commercial fishing in the area with far-reaching environmental consequences.
Continue reading...Why Australia’s most prominent climate change deniers have stopped talking about the climate
Global heating sceptics now argue it is more palatable with the electorate to pivot from climate denialism to anti-renewable energy scepticism
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The only regular meeting of Australia’s Saltbush Club takes place most Thursday evenings at a golf club in Five Dock, in Sydney’s inner west. The group’s founding members – a collection of the country’s most prominent and avid global heating deniers – include Gina Rinehart, the former Queensland premier Campbell Newman, former Business Council of Australia head Hugh Morgan, and Coalition MP Colin Boyce.
At Five Dock, the crowd is mostly old and mostly white. They sometimes host contrarian speakers. But about six years ago, this gathering of climate sceptics decided to stop talking publicly about the climate.
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Continue reading...‘Smart, green thinking’: four innovative London council carbon offset projects
Council housing microgrid and tube-powered heat network among schemes supported by Mayor of London fund
Carbon offset funding received from developers should be spent mostly on energy efficiency, renewable energy and district heating projects, according to guidance from the mayor of London. But some councils say the amount of funding they receive is often not enough to cover the cost of these kinds of projects.
However, others have found solutions to this by combining their offset cash with other sources of funding to pay for major projects. Perhaps the most innovative example of this is Islington council’s award-winning Bunhill heat and power network in north London, which has received more than £5m in offset funding.
Continue reading...How space exploration can improve life on Earth | Leigh Phillips
There is a cynical, ‘anti-space’ ideology emerging, especially on some parts of the left. But this is misguided
John F Kennedy once called space-faring “the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which Man has ever embarked”. We go to space because, he said – like George Mallory said of his reason to conquer Everest – “it is there.”
While it is truer to say that the race for space between Washington and Moscow was driven as much by cold war competition as by humanity’s pioneering spirit and the imperatives of scientific exploration, billions of ordinary people around the world recognized as much at the time and still were able to marvel at our species’ accomplishments in the heavens regardless of the flag under which they were achieved, from Sputnik to the moon landing.
Continue reading...