Latest news

Funds set aside for national charging network and tech research, but lack of scrappage scheme disappoints

Electric cars have received a funding boost with the government earmarking £340m for a national charging network and subsidies for vehicle purchases.

However, further budget backing for greener vehicles was limited to a small rise in vehicle excise duty for new diesel cars that fail to meet rigorous emissions standards – disappointing campaigners who had hoped for a rise in fuel duty or a diesel scrappage scheme.

Related: Key points from budget 2017 – at a glance

Continue reading...

Growth must go on – it’s the political imperative everywhere, and it’s destroying the Earth. But there’s no way of greening it, so we need a new system

Everyone wants everything – how is that going to work? The promise of economic growth is that the poor can live like the rich and the rich can live like the oligarchs. But already we are bursting through the physical limits of the planet that sustains us. Climate breakdown, soil loss, the collapse of habitats and species, the sea of plastic, insectageddon: all are driven by rising consumption. The promise of private luxury for everyone cannot be met: neither the physical nor the ecological space exists.

Related: UK environment department using 1,400 disposable coffee cups a day

I know people who recycle meticulously, measure the water in their kettles, then take their holidays in the Caribbean

Related: Insectageddon: farming is more catastrophic than climate breakdown | George Monbiot

Continue reading...

Australia’s white lemuroid possum became my symbol for habitat loss and global warming that will send one-third of species to extinction by mid-century

It was 8 November, 2011 and I had just had one of the best days of my parliamentary career. We had made history when the Senate adopted legislation to implement an emissions trading scheme to address global warming. I was both exhausted and excited, having negotiated and shepherded the legislation through the senate for the Greens. It had been a long haul over many years.

Then an email landed in my inbox; after some preliminary congratulations, the writer and vice-chancellor of James Cook University, Sandra Harding, asked why I was wearing a polar bear badge in the newspaper photographs and not one representing an Australian animal.

Related: Revealed: first mammal species wiped out by human-induced climate change

Much has been written about how global warming will affect the colder parts of the planet – the polar and boreal regions, glaciers, and alpine mountains. In fact, some of the warmest places on Earth, especially tropical rainforests, could also be intensely vulnerable to climate change … many people are unaware that tropical species – particularly those specialised for cool, cloudy mountaintops – are often sensitive to hot weather … as temperatures rise mountaintop specialists have nowhere to go. Their populations will wither and shrink and potentially disappear altogether.

The fruit bats normally just doze in the treetops through the day but on this afternoon they were fanning themselves, panting frantically, jostling for shady spots and licking their wrists in a desperate effort to cool down. Suddenly when the thermometer hit 42C the bats began falling from the trees. Most quickly died. The research team led by Justin Welbergen counted 1,453 dead from one colony alone.

Just how empty and silent the seas and those landscapes become depends on us

Related: The Earth stands on the brink of its sixth mass extinction and the fault is ours

Continue reading...

If Brexit goes ahead, Britain will need to shape a green politics with devolution and social justice at its core. And make sure that politicians cannot renege on our international obligations

The tragedy of climate change, as the governor of the Bank of England has put it, is one of the horizon. The catastrophic impacts of altering the atmosphere impose an enormous cost on future generations that the current generation creates but has no incentive to fix. To focus the minds of today’s decision-makers the 2015 Paris agreement sent a clear signal that the era of fossil-fuel-powered growth was coming to an end. The signatories agreed to limit global warming to no more than a two-degree celsius rise, the threshold of safety, beyond which climate change is likely to become irreversible. The real genius of Paris is not that it is rooted in science but its timing and its structure. While the 2C target was binding, the national targets agreed by each nation were not. Those non-binding targets do not add up to a 2C world – they would, if followed to the letter, lead us to a 3C one, unthinkable in terms of the devastation it would cause. So upping them was part of the point of this year’s UN climate meeting in Bonn, which closed on Friday, and will be the main issue at next year’s, and the year after next.

The US under Donald Trump reneged on the deal before this year’s talks began. There is some solace in the fact that Washington cannot formally withdraw until 4 November 2020, the day after the next presidential election. The rest of the world, rightly, is moving on. Given what is at stake, it is worth pausing to consider where – and how quickly – the globe is going. Backwards – if one considers that China will almost single-handedly cause global emissions of carbon dioxide to grow in 2017. Canada and Britain, meanwhile, began a new 19-nation alliance in Bonn aimed at phasing out the use of coal power by 2030. This sounds like an important move until one realises that members of the “powering past coal alliance” account for less than 3% of coal use worldwide. Germany, which is not a member, held the climate talks an hour’s drive from a village that is being demolished to make way for a coalmine. These green talks, which are fundamentally about ethical concerns, are nevertheless becoming more like discussions about trade. In the case of climate change these involve transitions from one way of producing, distributing and consuming energy to another, cleaner way of doing so. It would be good if this could be seen only as a process of mutual support. However, as the talks in Bonn show, they are also hard-nosed negotiations which revolve around the exchange of concessions.

Continue reading...