The climate damage done by avoidable flying is huge, yet the government sees more planes as the answer to its economic woes
August is peak flying time, and airports are on many minds. The government has signalled its support for colossal expansions, whose extra flights would bust its carbon pledges. The excuse is that supertechnology will magic away the extra CO2 pumped into the atmosphere, though it must know that clean, green flying is still futurology. Here’s the pity of it: until now this government has rightly boasted of its green credentials, making massive investments in sustainable energy and retro-insulating cold homes. Expanding air travel is not on any green agenda.
Heathrow has just submitted proposals for a £50bn third runway, as approved by Labour in 2009 and the Tories who voted it through parliament in 2018. Covid applied the brakes but now Heathrow is back with gold-plated, “shovel-ready” plans. Its owners, including Qatar, Singapore and Saudi Arabia, expect the planning bill to prevent newts or judicial reviews blocking the runway. Their pitch to an investment-hungry government is that expanding Europe’s busiest airport would create 100,000 new jobs, propelling growth with 750 extra daily flights.
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Breaking Waves: Ocean News
08/05/2025 - 02:00
08/05/2025 - 01:57
After 90% loss of global sunflower sea star population in 10 years, researchers hope decline can now be tackled
A decade after the onset of a sea star wasting disease (SSWD) epidemic considered the largest ever documented in the wild, researchers have identified the microbial culprit responsible: a strain of the bacterium Vibrio pectenicida.
In 10 years, the bacterium has ravaged sunflower sea stars (Pycnopodia helianthoides), a large sea star or starfish, along the western coast of North America, with a loss of 5.8 billion since 2013 – or 90% of the total global population. The sunflower sea star is on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s red list of critically endangered species.
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08/05/2025 - 01:00
Azita Gandjei’s mesmerising black and white photos capture the point at which the boundaries between people and nature dissolve
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08/05/2025 - 00:41
In today’s newsletter: Inside a critical summit of 179 countries at the UN in Geneva to secure a treaty that will combat plastic pollution
Good morning. Not only does plastic waste clog up waterways, beaches and strangle sea life, it also causes havoc inside the human body. Tiny fragments – invisible to the human eye – are probably swimming around your lungs, blood and liver right now.
This represents a “growing and underrecognised danger” to human health, the latest report in the Lancet warns, as 10 days of tense talks kick off in Geneva today, with 179 countries due to hash out a kind of “Paris agreement for plastic pollution”.
Weather | Gusts of more than 100mph from Storm Floris have brought travel disruption, power cuts and the widespread cancellation of events across large parts of the UK. Disruption to the rail network in Scotland is expected until around 4pm on Tuesday, ScotRail has said.
UK news | A member of the House of Lords urged ministers to crack down on Palestine Action at the request of a US defence company that employs him as an adviser. Police are planning to arrest anyone demonstrating in support of Palestine Action this weekend.
Politics | The Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch, is not telling the truth about the “real failures of 14 years of Conservative government”, the former Conservative prime minister Liz Truss has said.
Tommy Robinson | The far-right activist known as Tommy Robinson has been arrested by British police on suspicion of grievous bodily harm after a man was allegedly assaulted at a London railway station.
Gaza | More than 100 critically ill and injured children in Gaza hope to come to the UK as soon as possible after the government announced a scheme to provide those in severe need with NHS care.
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08/05/2025 - 00:00
Chinese fast fashion retailer penalised month after €40m fine from French regulator in July
The Italian authorities have fined Shein €1m (£870,000) for making “misleading or omissive” environmental claims about its products, the second time in as many months the Chinese fashion retailer has been targeted by European regulators.
Environmental sustainability and social responsibility messages on Shein’s website were in some cases “vague, generic, and/or overly emphatic” and in others were “misleading or omissive”, said Italy’s competition authority, AGCM.
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08/04/2025 - 23:00
Professor Richard Thompson, a marine litter expert, says delegates must act decisively to ‘look next generation in the eye’
Delegates at the UN plastic pollution treaty talks in Geneva must secure an ambitious global agreement so they can look future generations in the eye, one of the world’s leading marine litter experts has said.
Prof Richard Thompson, who was named one of Time’s 100 most influential people this year for his groundbreaking work on plastic pollution, said decisive action was needed to protect human health and the planet.
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08/04/2025 - 23:00
Wular Lake once supported 5,000 people who harvested the plant’s edible roots, until the lake silted up after floods. Now the lotuses are back
“We threw seeds into the lake hundreds of times, but nothing grew. It’s only now, after the silt was cleared, that we see the flowers again after nearly 33 years,” says Bashir Ahmad, a 65-year-old who fishes in Kashmir’s Wular Lake for his livelihood.
Wular was once among Asia’s largest freshwater lakes. It lies in the Kashmir valley, about 18 miles (30km) north-west of Srinagar, at the foot of the Pir Panjal and Himalayan mountain ranges. It was renowned for its high-quality lotus plants, and sustained the livelihoods of more than 5,000 people who harvested and sold nadru – the edible lotus stem cherished as a delicacy in Kashmiri households and which features in wazwan, the region’s traditional multi-course celebratory meals.
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08/04/2025 - 14:20
At least three people injured and over 450 structures under threat by Gifford blaze, with only 3% of perimeter contained
A huge wildfire in central California has threatened hundreds of homes, with blazes churning through the brush-covered hillsides in Los Padres national forest.
At least three people were reported injured, and more than 450 structures were under threat by the Gifford fire, officials said on Monday.
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08/04/2025 - 12:55
More than 700 active wildfires burning across Canada and about two-thirds are currently out-of-control
Billowing smoke from hundreds of out-of-control wildfires – most of which are in the Canadian Prairies – have caused severe air quality alerts across Canada and the United States.
Detroit, Michigan, and the Canadian cities of Montreal and Toronto, recorded some of the worst air quality in the world on Monday, according to a ranking by IQAir, a Swiss air quality technology company.
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08/04/2025 - 10:00
Glacial retreat on pristine world heritage-listed island as temperatures warm could endanger unique plant life
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Glaciers on a remote Australian subantarctic island are shrinking rapidly, losing almost a quarter of their size in just 70 years, with researchers fearing glaciers on a neighbouring peninsula may have already disappeared.
Analysis of aerial photographs and maps going back to 1947 were combined with satellite data to track melting on 29 glaciers on the uninhabited wilderness of Heard Island, 4,100km south-west of Perth and 1,500km north of Antarctica.
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