Exclusive: Critics say removing battery installation requirement will reduce amount homebuyers save on energy bills
Ministers are poised to allow homes in England to be built without carbon-cutting technology in what experts have said is a climbdown after pressure from housebuilders.
The future homes standard (FHS), due to be published in January, will regulate how all homes are built and is expected to enforce tough new regulations such as mandating solar panels on nearly all houses and high standards of insulation and heat pumps in most cases.
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Breaking Waves: Ocean News
01/02/2026 - 01:00
01/02/2026 - 01:00
Christine wanted to enjoy her retirement, but then the banks of a local brook burst and turned her and her neighbours’ lives upside-down
When I visited Christine’s bungalow in Trowell, Nottinghamshire, and asked if I should take my shoes off, she joked: “I wouldn’t worry, I’ll be getting a new carpet soon enough when it floods again.” She’s got another good one about the time she, a 70-year-old great-grandmother, had to climb through her conservatory window because her front and back doors had been sealed shut by flood barriers. “If you don’t laugh, you’ll cry,” she says. And there is a lot to cry about: mainly the fact that her home is unsellable due to multiple floods.
In 2020, the brook that backs on to Christine’s home burst its banks and water poured into her house, as well as the homes of her neighbours Jackie, 67, and Rhona, 76. As we sit around a table drinking tea, they tell me about having to rip out their floorboards, skirting boards, kitchen cupboards and entire bathrooms. Doors had to be taken off their hinges and thrown into skips. Fridges, washing machines, furniture, all joined the pile.
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01/02/2026 - 00:00
New year plant hunt shows rising temperatures are shifting natural cycles of wildflowers such as daisies
Daisies and dandelions are among hundreds of native plant species blooming in the UK, in what scientists have called a “visible signal” of climate breakdown disrupting the natural world.
A Met Office analysis of data from the annual new year’s plant hunt over the past nine years found an extra 2.5 species in bloom during the new year period for every 1C rise in temperature at a given location during the previous November and December. This year’s hunt started on Thursday and runs until Sunday.
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01/01/2026 - 18:36
New utes, sports cars and hatchbacks will break price records at both ends as traditional brands release electric vehicles in 2026
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Australians can expect to see more electric utes, sports cars and hatchbacks that break price records at both ends of the spectrum, with changes encouraging even the most reluctant brands to join the trend.
But the electric vehicle market could also experience significant regulatory upheaval in 2026, with a road-user charge on the national agenda and a review of tax exemptions.
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01/01/2026 - 07:30
As the Trump administration derides climate policy as a ‘scam’, emissions-cutting measures are gaining popularity
A group of progressive politicians and advocates are reframing emissions-cutting measures as a form of economic populism as the Trump administration derides climate policy as a “scam” and fails to deliver on promises to tame energy costs and inflation.
Climate politics were once cast as a test of moral resolve, calling on Americans to accept higher costs to avert environmental catastrophe, but that ignores how rising temperatures themselves drive up costs for working people, said Stevie O’Hanlon, co-founder of the youth-led Sunrise Movement.
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01/01/2026 - 03:00
For 10 years, the scientist and photographer Jeroen Hoekendijk has been observing pinnipeds such as seals and walruses on the fragile North Sea archipelago stretching along the Dutch, German and Danish coastline. A remainder of the now-drowned Doggerland, left behind after the ice age, the low-lying islands are an advance warning sign of the warming and rising seas of the climate crisis
Photographs by Jeroen Hoekendijk, text by Philip Hoare
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01/01/2026 - 00:00
Tim Smit also says extreme political views will fade when people realise good things around the corner
Sir Tim Smit says the world is in a better place than it was when he co-founded the Eden Project 25 years ago and he believes people are more attuned to the natural world.
Speaking as the project in Cornwall reaches its 25th anniversary, Smit describedextreme political views as the “roar” of people fearful that they cannot control the future but he said they would fade when people realised that good things were around the corner.
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12/31/2025 - 12:00
Legal action has brought important decisions, from the scrapping of fossil fuel plants to revised climate plans
This year marks the 10th anniversary of the Paris agreement. It is also a decade since another key moment in climate justice, when a state was ordered for the first time to cut its carbon emissions faster to protect its citizens from climate change. The Urgenda case, which was upheld by the Netherlands’ supreme court in 2019, was one of the first rumblings of a wave of climate litigation around the world that campaigners say has resulted in a new legal architecture for climate protection.
Over the past 12 months, there have been many more important rulings and tangible changes on climate driven by legal action.
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12/31/2025 - 10:47
Microplastics in rivers, lakes, and oceans aren’t just drifting debris—they’re constantly leaking invisible clouds of chemicals into the water. New research shows that sunlight drives this process, causing different plastics to release distinct and evolving mixtures of dissolved organic compounds as they weather. These chemical plumes are surprisingly complex, often richer and more biologically active than natural organic matter, and include additives, broken polymer fragments, and oxidized molecules.
How the climate crisis showed up in Americans’ lives this year: ‘The shift has been swift and stark’
12/31/2025 - 10:00
Guardian US readers share how global heating and biodiversity loss affected their lives in ways that don’t always make the headlines
The past year was another one of record-setting heat and catastrophic storms. But across the US, the climate crisis showed up in smaller, deeply personal ways too.
Campfires that once defined summer trips were never lit due to wildfire risks. There were no bites where fish were once abundant, forests turned to meadows after a big burn and childhood memories of winter wonderlands turned to slush.
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