US, top carbon emitter in history, has ‘a lot of responsibility’ for causing ‘substantial’ harm globally, scientist says
The US has caused an eye-watering $10tn in global damages to the world over the past three decades through its vast planet-heating emissions, with a quarter of this economic pain inflicted upon itself, new research has found.
By being the largest carbon emitter in history, the US has caused greater harm to worldwide economic growth than any other country, ahead of China, now the world’s largest emitter that is responsible for $9tn in GDP damage since 1990, according to the findings of the paper.
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Breaking Waves: Ocean News
03/25/2026 - 11:00
03/25/2026 - 10:00
A long-running experiment in Colorado provides an ‘alarming’ view of how rapidly unchecked global heating could transform fragile ecosystems
Every summer, people descend on the wildflower capital of Colorado to see grasslands flush with corn lilies, aspen sunflowers and sub-alpine larkspur. In January 1991, scientists set up a unique experiment in these Rocky Mountain meadows. It was one of the first (and longest running) to work out how the changing climate would affect an ecosystem.
At the time, it was believed a temperature increase could lead to longer, lusher grasses. But instead of flourishing, the grasses and wildflowers started to disappear, replaced by sage brush. The experimental meadows morphed into a desert-like scrubland. Even the fungi in the soils were transformed by heat.
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03/25/2026 - 02:00
Constituents’ frustration with Richard Tice reflects growing problem for party and its leaders’ climate-sceptic stance
“The worst part of it was the smell,” says Audrey Crook, 58. A full-time carer who lives with her 20-year-old son, Crook woke up at 11pm one night to find a foot of flood water on the ground floor of her home. “It was like black water. It had sewage and everything in it, it was absolutely disgusting.”
Crook’s home – along with more than 30 others on Wyberton West Road and Park Road in Boston, Lincolnshire – was flooded in January last year when heavy rain swept across the region, raising river levels and exceeding flood defences.
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03/25/2026 - 02:00
The fragility of the global food system fills me with dread – and the war with Iran has exposed just how close to collapse it is
The fate of environmentalists is to spend their lives trying not to be proved right. Vindication is what we dread. But there’s one threat that haunts me more than any other: the collapse of the global food system. We cannot predict what the immediate trigger might be. But the war with Iran is just the right kind of event.
Drawing on years of scientific data, I’ve been arguing for some time that this risk exists – and that governments are completely unprepared for it. In 2023, I made a submission to a parliamentary inquiry into environmental change and food security, with a vast list of references. Called as a witness, I spent much of the time explaining that the issue was much wider than the inquiry’s scope.
George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist
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03/25/2026 - 00:00
I had to deal with the energy shock in Germany after Putin invaded Ukraine. The solution now is the same: buy ourselves out of the fossil fuels trap
Yes, there are big differences between the war of aggression that Russia has now been waging against Ukraine for four years and the war the US and Israel launched against Iran. The biggest difference: the US is still a democracy. Even a president who considers himself all-powerful is not. From scathing press coverage to anger over high oil prices, fear of the midterm elections and – the capitalist form of democracy – falling stock prices, what people think makes a difference. That is why the US president is occasionally forced to change his mind. That is not the case in Russia.
Vladimir Putin had a clear plan: Russia wanted to occupy the whole of Ukraine and turn it into a satellite state or annex its territory. Putin was preparing for this war for years, in my view; this included a cheap energy trap into which he successfully lured Germany through the construction of Nord Stream 2 and the purchase of gas storage facilities and refineries by Gazprom and Rosneft.
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03/24/2026 - 11:18
Advocates say Lee Zeldin’s EPA has rolled back protections and cut staff and funding, putting health at risk
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More than 160 environmental and public health organizations on Tuesday called for Lee Zeldin, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator, to resign or be fired.
“No [EPA] administrator in history – Democratic or Republican – has so brazenly betrayed the agency’s core mission,” the groups wrote in an open letter. “EPA’s foremost purpose is to protect human health and the environment. With Administrator Lee Zeldin at the helm, EPA has abandoned its mission, creating damage that will take decades to address.”
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03/24/2026 - 10:54
GB Energy’s Jürgen Maier says production could bring economic benefits and give supply chains ‘time to transition’ to renewables
The head of the UK’s national green energy champion has joined other high-profile renewable energy leaders in making the case for more North Sea oil and gas production as the government braces for an energy cost crisis.
The GB Energy boss, Jürgen Maier, used a social media post on LinkedIn to reject the claim that more North Sea oil and gas could help to bring down energy costs, which have soared as the war in Iran has escalated.
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03/24/2026 - 09:00
Some residents moved amid threat of flooding are under public guardianship due to reduced mental capacity. NT public guardian says they ‘would have been very frightened’
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Frail aged care residents were forced to shelter in an open-sided basketball court in Katherine, sleeping in makeshift conditions as authorities scrambled to prepare for major river flooding triggered by ex-Tropical Cyclone Narelle.
Residents from Rocky Ridge and Katherine Hostel aged care facilities were evacuated to MacFarlane primary school where many spent the night at a covered basketball court, with rain blowing into the open-sided shelter, as the deep tropical-low swept through the region.
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03/24/2026 - 07:42
Conservationists celebrate second twin birth just two months after another set discovered in Virunga national park
A second set of mountain gorilla twins has been born in Virunga national park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), in what conservationists are celebrating as an “extraordinary” event for the endangered primates.
Just two months after tiny twin mountain gorillas were discovered by rangers in the Virunga massif, in eastern DRC, another rare twin birth has been found by park wardens. This time, an infant male and female have been spotted in the Baraka family, a troop of 19 mountain gorillas that roam the region’s high-altitude rainforests.
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03/24/2026 - 07:00
Vast journeys, among world’s great wonders, found to be under threat as freshwater fish populations crash by 81%
“It’s very hard to imagine what’s going on beneath the water when you look at a river – but you have billions of fish making these epic migrations, some of the largest animal migrations on Earth,” said Dr Zeb Hogan, at the University of Nevada in the US.
The longest migration of any freshwater fish species is that of the dorado catfish, which makes a migration of 7,000 miles (11,000km), from spawning in the foothills of the Andes to feeding in the Amazon estuary and back again. The silver-gold fish themselves were incredible, said Hogan: “They get to about 2 metres long.”
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