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Survey suggests the corporate community is increasingly at odds with the Morrison government’s gas-led recovery
Company directors want a more radical policy reset to recover from the Covid-19 recession including bigger investments in infrastructure, reforms of industrial relations and a Green New Deal.
The Australian Institute of Company Directors’ sentiment index, released on Thursday, found that climate and energy policy remain the two most important short-term priorities for company directors.
Related: Australia must prepare now for climate-related disasters or pay more later, insurance regulator says
Related: Investors lead push for Australian business to cut emissions more than government forecasts
Continue reading...Reduced yields are putting national dish and ‘symbol of Belgium’ under threat
Food vendors in Belgium are praying for rain as the hot weather threatens the supply of the country’s national dish, frites.
The Europe-wide heatwave has shrunk Belgium’s early crop of potatoes by about one-third compared with an average year. Without significant rainfall over the next few weeks, the key September and October harvests could be smaller still.
Related: Brussels' battered chip shacks to get revamp
Continue reading...The summer of heatwaves and forest fires leaves my friends feeling helpless and a little hysterical. And who can blame us?
The New York Times has devoted an entire edition of its magazine, some 30,000 words, to a terrifying piece about climate change. With 2C warming – an unlikely best-case scenario at this point, scientists were quoted as saying – the planet faces “long-term disaster”. With 3C warming, we are looking at “the loss of most coastal cities”. The possibility that the Earth might warm by 5C, wrote the author, Nathaniel Rich, had prompted some of the world’s leading scientists to warn of the end of human civilisation.
Related: Huge rise of people at risk from wildfires as western US population grows
Continue reading...It’s crunch time for the Neg, the Turnbull government's flagship energy policy. Guardian Australia's political editor Katharine Murphy looks at whether the plan is likely to succeed, who wins and who loses under it, and will it be worth the procedural pain
• Commonwealth and state governments deadlocked before Coag energy meeting
Continue reading...The Guardian’s extraordinary Defenders project recorded the deaths of people around the world fighting to save the planet. Here, the series’ lead writer remembers their stories
Even before I knew who she was or what she had suffered, there was clearly something special about Marivic Danyan.
The young T’boli woman was standing silently in a noisy crowd when we reached the village of Datal Bonglangon, deep within the conflict-riven island of Mindanao, in the Philippines.
Related: Nine activists defending the Earth from violent assault
Continue reading...Yvette Cooper’s strategy to support workers to move to new, good-quality jobs from those destroyed by the coming technological revolution is commendable (Automation could destroy jobs. We must deal with it now, 7 August). However, it presupposes that such jobs will themselves be enabled by the new technology, and that enough of them can be created. Both are debatable points.
An additional strategy is to support moves into good-quality jobs that depend less, if at all, on technology. An example is food production. In France, pioneering efforts at Bec Hellouin have proved that intensive cultivation of vegetables and fruit with well-designed hand tools can be as productive and profitable per hour worked as large-scale mechanised farming. Crucially, and counterintuitively, these results get better as the cultivated area per person gets smaller. Judging from the pioneers, such work is conducive to physical and mental health, soil health, family life, and time for activities outside work. This is not a return to peasantry.
Continue reading...Feedback effects could spark irreversible global warming, says scientists. But what does the word ‘hothouse’ imply?
Scientists warned this week that feedback effects in global warming might tip the Earth into a “hothouse state”, recovery from which could be impossible, even by reductions in CO2 emissions. How frightened should we be about moving from a greenhouse to a hothouse?
The mechanism by which atmospheric gases warm the planet has been well understood since the 19th century. High CO2 levels early in the Earth’s history, wrote the geologist Thomas Sterry Hunt in 1867, had created the sort of climate that would have resulted if we “had covered the Earth with an immense dome of glass, had transformed it into a great orchid house”. The term “greenhouse effect” was coined in 1907.
Related: Domino-effect of climate events could move Earth into a ‘hothouse’ state
Continue reading...Michael Myer says size of grant ‘unheard of’ as Josh Frydenberg refuses to say where idea originated
The environment minister, Josh Frydenberg, would not say whose idea it was to award a $444m government grant to the Great Barrier Reef Foundation, on the same day a former member of the foundation’s board described the allocation as “unthinkable”.
Michael Myer, of the Myer family, was a member of the reef foundation’s board from 2001 to 2004 until he became concerned at what he called the growing “corporatist” direction of the organisation.
Related: 'It stinks': $444m grant to reef foundation is a scandal, Greens say
Related: Head of reef foundation says $444m grant was 'complete surprise'
Continue reading...On Monday we received the distressing news that the agro-forestry farm where our son and his partner live in Portugal has been destroyed by wildfires. Thankfully no lives were lost. This is one of a host of wildfires that have broken out this year around the world. Excessive temperatures and high wind speeds were contributory factors in these fires, both consequences of climate change.
In the UK we’re experiencing an unprecedented hot spell, with adverse impact on our own farmers of lack of rain for crops and reduced yields. The heat has affected the frail and elderly, with the NHS being under stress in a way normally experienced only during winter.
Related: Have your photos published in the Guardian's letters pages
Continue reading...Research shows geoengineering method intended to combat climate change would have adverse effect on agriculture
Proposals to combat climate change by reflecting the sun’s rays back into space would cause widespread crop failure, cancelling out any benefits to farming from the reduction in warming, according to new research.
By examining the effects of volcanic eruptions on agriculture – which has a similar effect to proposed artificial methods of scattering solar radiation through aerosols – scientists have concluded that such methods could have unintended consequences.
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