The prime minister has announced the scrapping or watering down of some of the UK's net zero targets, pushing back a ban on diesel and petrol vehicles from 2030 to 2035 and weakening a plan to phase out the installation of gas boilers by 2035
Rishi Sunak confirms rollback of key green targets
UK net zero policies: what has Sunak scrapped and what do changes mean?
‘We need more investment, not less’: UK voters on Sunak’s net zero rollback
UK politics live
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Breaking Waves: Ocean News
09/20/2023 - 12:32
09/20/2023 - 12:03
‘Red wall’ constituents critical of prime minister’s plan to water down climate commitments
“Rishi likes to jump on his little jet. I don’t have a car, I don’t fly on planes.”
In the opinion of Claire Savage, the manager of the Ironstone Miner pub in Guisborough, the prime minister’s plan to water down net zero commitments that he says impose a direct cost on consumers is disingenuous.
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09/20/2023 - 11:20
UK prime minister delays ban on sale of new petrol and diesel cars as he pushes back net zero goals
UK politics live – latest updates
Rishi Sunak has announced a major U-turn on the government’s climate commitments as he promised to put his party on a more radical path in an attempt to close the gap with Labour before the next general election.
In one of his biggest policy changes since taking office, Sunak confirmed the UK would push back the deadline for selling new petrol and diesel cars and the phasing out of gas boilers, prompting furious condemnation from the automobile and energy industries.
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09/20/2023 - 11:10
Springwatch host claims politicians ignored veteran conservationist’s message on the climate crisis – and ‘failed humanity wholesale’
Broadcaster and conservationist Chris Packham has claimed that David Attenborough’s Cop 26 speech had no impact. The Planet Earth creator was lauded for his 2021 address at the Glasgow climate summit, in which he urged an audience including US President Joe Biden to commit to holding global temperature rises to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.
However, Packham claims that politicians’ total failure to take the broadcaster’s words on board meant they had no impact.
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09/20/2023 - 10:51
Labour criticises deputy PM’s decision to use 158-seat Voyager instead of a scheduled service as ‘wrong on every level’
UK politics live – latest updates
Oliver Dowden flew on a near-empty RAF plane to the UN general assembly in New York this week, the Guardian has learned, prompting criticism that he wasted taxpayers’ money and caused unnecessary damage to the environment.
The deputy prime minister travelled on the 158-seat RAF Voyager with only a few advisers and defence personnel, sources said. The aircraft is usually used to transport senior ministers with large delegations of officials, journalists and occasionally business executives.
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09/20/2023 - 10:03
X-rays of an ancient jawless fish shows earliest-known example of internal cartilage skull, unlike that of any other known vertebrate.
09/20/2023 - 10:00
My favourite bird, the fastest in the world, calls to something in me
The Australian bird of the year poll launches on 25 September 2023
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The peregrine is the fastest animal in the world. It drops on its prey from above, a 300km/h shard of death. This path, sky to ground, is called a hunting line – a phrase I first saw in JA Baker’s The Peregrine – my favourite book (also Werner Herzog’s, turns out), probably my favourite possession. Book and bird have been indistinguishable to me since: a talisman of what is beautiful and wild.
“They are killers,” Baker wrote in 1967. “That is what they are for.” To find one, look up. See it, as he did, “remote as a star … a small dark knuckle in the flawless sky”. Before it drops:
He seemed to split in two, his body shooting off like an arrow from the tight-strung bow of his wings. There was an unholy impetus in his falling, as though he had been hurled from the sky. It was hard to believe, afterwards, that it had happened at all.
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09/20/2023 - 10:00
Unsubstantiated claims of nuclear energy’s worth distracts from the urgency to act now on climate crisis
The vague, ideological push for nuclear energy backed by the Coalition and News Corp and given legitimacy this week on the ABC’s Q+A should be treated as what it is: the latest step in a decades-long campaign of delay and denial on the climate crisis.
Nuclear energy likely has a role to play in the global shift to zero-emissions energy in places that already use it or that have few other options. As with other technology, its role may grow or recede over time as the world moves. This stuff is going to change.
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09/20/2023 - 09:53
Scientists confirm three birds have died from virus as park authorities redouble efforts to protect islands’ endemic birds
National park authorities on the Galápagos Islands have heightened biosecurity measures to protect the archipelago’s unique fauna from the deadly H5N1 strain of avian influenza after scientists confirmed that three birds had died from the virus.
“From preliminary tests of the five specimens, three of them have tested positive for H5N1 avian influenza,” Danny Rueda, director of the Galápagos national park told the Guardian. Two frigate birds and one red-footed booby were confirmed to have died from the virus on Tuesday, after samples were sent to Guayaquil on the Ecuadorian mainland for examination.
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09/20/2023 - 09:00
Armed with plastic pots, probes and the science of eDNA, researchers in Gloucestershire are searching for evidence of the critically endangered fish
The astonishing secrets being revealed by the science of environmental DNA (eDNA) are revolutionising the way in which we study and protect biodiversity, from the densest tropical jungle to the deepest ocean trench. But standing beside a ditch in the Gloucestershire countryside with a team from the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust (WWT), it soon becomes apparent that collecting this biological calling card can still be very rudimentary.
A plastic pot attached to a piece of string is cast into the murky water and, once full, reeled back in, sealed and labelled. A slightly more scientific-looking probe is then sent into the water to measure pH levels before the team moves on to sample the next pool.
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