Guardian Environment News

New law – condemned as ‘illegitimate giveaway to the oil and gas industry’ – requires state parks to be leased to interested parties

Environmental groups have launched a last-minute effort to halt an extraordinary new law in Ohio that requires government agencies to lease state parks and other public state lands to the oil and gas industry.

A temporary injunction filed on Thursday seeks to put the brakes on legislation that requires state parks to be leased for fracking and which redefines the potent greenhouse gas methane as “green energy”. The law was due to go into effect on 7 April, but the court has not yet responded to the injunction.

Critics say a proposal to dispose of salt from waste brine by burying it in lined landfill is ‘not a long-term solution’

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Local landholders and advocacy groups in southern Queensland have criticised the state government’s plans to store millions of tonnes of coal seam gas waste in lined landfills, saying it risks contaminating the Murray-Darlin Basin.

They have also questioned the integrity of the government’s long-awaited waste management action plan for coal seam gas brine, saying it relies on research from oil and gas lobby group the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association (Appea) and the University of Queensland Centre for Natural Gas, whose donors include Arrow Energy, Australia Pacific LNGand Santos.

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Research found that ‘forever chemicals’ had ‘no practical benefit’ in repelling water and stains as compared with untreated fabric

A new peer-reviewed study calls into question how well PFAS-based products repel water and stains in furniture, shoes, clothing, carpeting, outdoor gear and other consumer goods made of fabric.

Most water and stain repellents applied to fabrics worldwide use toxic PFAS as a main ingredient, and though the controversial chemicals are in thousands of products, water and stain repellency are two of their main consumer functions.

Leaks were contained and posed no danger, official reports say, but past disasters continue to cause fears of power source

In December, Janica Jammes started a microgreens business in the basement of her home in Big Lake, Minnesota, just across the river from Xcel Energy’s nuclear plant in Monticello.

At least once each day, she uses water from her well to nourish the plant trays. She delivers her product to customers within a 10-mile radius and says the business has been a success.

The best of this week’s wildlife photographs, including a rare leopard, very deep-swimming fish and baby ducks

Having already discovered the presumed extinct great fox-spider, Mike Waite goes hunting on MoD land armed with a pair of his wife’s tights, an old medicine syringe and plastic cups

As a spider-hunting specialist, Mike Waite’s artillery of choice is a pooter. It’s a homemade sucking contraption made from his daughter’s old Calpol syringe and a pair of his wife’s tights (“I like to think they were old ones”), which he uses as a filter so he doesn’t inhale any spiders.

I’m with Waite, from Surrey Wildlife Trust, on Brentmoor Heath, which is partly owned by the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and managed by the trust. It sounds like New Year’s Eve, with continuous bangs from the shooting range. We’re in the buffer zone, on lowland heathland, where the public are allowed and spiders are just waking up from their winter slumber. We see a wolf spider, a gorilla jumping spider, and a raft spider (which recently featured on David Attenborough’s Wild Isles) all in a single morning.

Revenue from mining key metal used in EV batteries to triple by 2027-28 while thermal coal exports set to fall by more than 70%

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Exports of Australian lithium – a key metal used in batteries – are expected to earn as much as sales of thermal coal within five years, as the world increasingly embraces clean energy and the market value of fossil fuels falls.

New data released by the Australian government forecasts local lithium production will double and the industry’s revenue will triple by 2027-28 compared with last financial year.

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Swedish prosecutor casts doubt over theories that independent group was responsible for pipeline blasts

The Swedish prosecutor investigating the Nord Stream sabotage attack has said the “clear main scenario” was that a state-sponsored group had been involved, seemingly casting doubt over theories that posited an independent group was responsible for the pipeline blasts.

Mats Ljungqvist told Reuters on Thursday that though a non-state-backed plot was still theoretically possible, the type of explosive used in the bombings ruled out a “large portion of actors”.

Noaa report shows rapid increase in atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide

Record temperatures, devastating floods and superstorms are causing death and destruction across the planet but humans are failing to cut greenhouse gas emissions fueling the climate emergency, new US data shows.

Atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide (CO2), methane and nitrous oxide – the greenhouse gases emitted by human activity that are the most significant contributors to global heating – continued to increase rapidly during 2022, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa).

Government’s UKEF criticised for ‘locking us all into more carbon emissions for decades to come’ with assistance for the sector

A UK government agency has financially supported the high-carbon aviation industry with billions of pounds since the Paris climate agreement was adopted, it can be revealed.

The effective subsidy for new airports, aircraft and maintenance comes despite the agency believing the oil-dependent sector is unlikely to begin cutting emissions “materially” before the next decade.

Troy, New York, has yet to remove a single lead pipe five years after getting the money. What went wrong?

In 2018, almost 30 cities across New York state received federal money to carry out a specific, urgent task: removing lead service lines that poison drinking water.

The city of Troy – which sits across the Hudson River and just north of Albany – was among them, receiving $500,000. But five years later, city leaders have failed to spend a single dollar of that money, and have yet to remove a single lead pipe.

Tulare Lake was drained a century ago. Now locals fear flooding as agencies rush in sandbags and rebuild levees

Kayode Kadara is worried about the rising waters near his home. Just a few months ago, this landscape in California’s Central Valley was a dry basin filled with pistachio and almond groves.

Then a winter of historic rain and snow brought Tulare Lake – a huge freshwater body drained a century ago by agricultural canals – rushing back from the dead. Workers from state agencies have brought sandbags in by helicopter, rebuilt levees and constructed walls to hold the deluge back.

Environmental law professor Jody Freeman urged to cut ties with ConocoPhillips, which pays her more than $350,000 a year

The Harvard environmental law professor at the centre of a conflict-of-interest row lobbied the regulator on behalf of the oil and gas company that pays her more than $350,000 a year, a new investigation can reveal.

Emails seen by the Guardian and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) show that Jody Freeman facilitated a meeting between a director at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and ConocoPhillips, one of the world’s worst polluters that is pushing to weaken forthcoming climate regulations. The company’s Willow drilling project in Alaska was recently approved by the Biden administration, despite scientists warning it will be catastrophic for global heating.

Cornishman Ned Bailey has caught and returned ‘notched’ lobsters for years as part of a broader effort to preserve stocks. But many fishers do not

Ned Bailey has spent the best part of four decades fishing off the south coast of Cornwall. Today, in his yellow oilskins and accompanied by his wind-tousled collie spaniel, the 58-year-old is doing the rounds in the Falmouth estuary, hauling up a string of rust-darkened lobster pots.

He tosses out stray crabs, several starfish and a squirming conger eel. Every so often he pulls out a lobster: if the carapace is over 90mm (3.5in) long, he keeps it; if not, it’s thrown back into the sea, in line with regulations.

Coalition of 13 regional Indigenous leaders points out Australian parliament’s votes are only 227 among nearly 18 million. Follow the day’s news live

• Liberal party accused of ‘turning its back’ on Indigenous people by opposing voice
• ‘Dutton’s voice stance doesn’t protect Indigenous people. The no campaign is already scaring them’ | Lorena Allam
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Former Tasmanian Liberal premier condemns party’s opposition to voice

Tasmania is the last Liberal state government left in the country and its former premier has taken to social media this morning to speak out against the federal party’s decision to oppose the voice to parliament.

Should the Liberal party maintain its opposition to the voice it will simply accelerate its increasing irrelevance.

I have asked for Cyber Security NSW to issue advice to NSW government employees, to implement this change as soon as possible.

I will no longer be using TikTok.

Shadow minister submits bill to curb spills as Environment Agency reveals sewage was dumped for almost 1m hours last year

Ministers have treated coastal communities as if they are “open sewers”, Labour has said, after a damaging analysis of Environment Agency (EA) data revealed sewage was dumped for almost a million hours last year.

In total, the data – which was analysed by the party – shows 141,777 sewage-dumping events occurred across 137 constituencies on the coasts of England and Wales in 2022.

Two people were seen boarding the train with the animal wrapped in a towel

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A platypus believed to have been taken from the wild and transported on a Brisbane train urgently needs to be returned to its natural environment, officials say.

Two people were spotted boarding the train at Morayfield on Tuesday with a platypus wrapped in a towel, Queensland police said.

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Gerard Rennick met with scorn, derision and plenty of corrections over viral tweet and claim that scientists are ‘cancelling gravity’

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An Australian senator has attempted to undermine the entire theory of the greenhouse effect with a bizarre viral claim that scientists have been ignoring gravity’s role in heating the planet.

The tweet from the Queensland senator Gerard Rennick, a member of the conservative Liberal National party of Queensland which is part of the main opposition Coalition, has gone viral this week and has been met with scorn, derision and plenty of corrections from high-profile climate scientists.

Chris Barrie says global heating poses larger security threat than China, and Australians should be armed with this information

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A former Australian defence force chief has called on the government to release its assessment of the security threats posed by the climate crisis, which he says they received late last year.

Guardian Australia understands the Office of National Intelligence’s “urgent climate risk assessment” looked at how global heating affected Australia’s national security, but relied in part on classified information.

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The Natural Resources Access Regulator is also prosecuting the alleged theft of water by another irrigator near Wentworth on the Murray

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A Riverina irrigator has been convicted and fined more than $150,000 for taking $1.1m worth of water from an at-risk groundwater source in south-western New South Wales during a period of drought between July 2017 and June 2020.

Dean Troy Salvestro pleaded guilty to five charges against sections 91G(2) and 60C(2) of the Water Management Act 2000 in a judgment handed down in the NSW land and environment court. Four of the charges concerned breaches of bore extraction limits and one charge was for taking water not in accordance with an access licence allocation.

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