There has been little talk about how Australia’s economy will get to net zero. That’s a terrible reflection on the state of our politics
The Coalition has been forced to reassert its commitment to the Paris climate agreement after its energy spokesperson, Ted O’Brien, appeared to waver on the pledge on Thursday.
O’Brien faced off against the climate change and energy minister, Chris Bowen, at a debate in Canberra, weeks out from a federal election in which energy policy is emerging as a hot-button issue.
Labor, the Coalition, nobody in this country will be able to achieve the emission target set by Chris Bowen and Anthony Albanese. The difference between Peter Dutton and Anthony Albanese is that Peter Dutton has been honest and upfront about that.
… go against the spirit, if not the letter, of the Paris Agreement, and – in some circumstances – could constitute a breach of those obligations.
Tony Wood is the energy and climate change program director at the Grattan Institute. This article was originally published in the Conversation
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Breaking Waves: Ocean News
Australian voters are left in the dark on climate targets as they head to the ballot box | Tony Wood
04/10/2025 - 20:05
04/10/2025 - 19:55
Workers had spent weeks in limbo amid legal rollercoaster but letters confirm block on terminations no longer in effect
Letters went out to hundreds of workers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) on Thursday, informing them their jobs had been terminated – again.
The probationary employees, many who performed important roles at the US’s pre-eminent climate research agency, have spent weeks in limbo after being dismissed in late February, only to be rehired and put on administrative leave in mid-March following a federal court order.
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04/10/2025 - 11:18
White House claims university’s work exposed students to ‘climate anxiety’ and ‘exaggerated climate threats’
US politics live – latest updates
Almost $4m in federal funding has been stripped from an Ivy League university’s prestigious climate research department because the Trump administration has determined it exposed students and other young people to “climate anxiety”.
The government research grants to Princeton University have been cut off because the White House considers its work on topics including sea level rise, coastal flooding and global warming to be promoting “exaggerated and implausible climate threats”, according to the New York Times.
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04/10/2025 - 10:21
Flemming Hansen and Mette Helbæk reject criticism of how they abandoned resort and fled to Guatemala
A Danish couple who fled their “forest resort” in Sweden for Guatemala and left behind a large tax debt and 158 barrels of human waste have hit back at criticism and claimed that their handling of the compost toilets was “very normal”.
Flemming Hansen and Mette Helbæk, both chefs, abandoned their purportedly eco-friendly retreat, Stedsans, in Halland, southern Sweden, last year. They owed large sums to Swedish and Danish tax authorities. They have since set up a business in Guatemala.
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04/10/2025 - 10:00
Addressing the Australian extinction crisis and the decline of our environment will be possible when political leaders embrace it
Explore the series – Last chance: the extinction crisis being ignored this election
Get Guardian Australia environment editor Adam Morton’s Clear Air column as an email
I’ve been wondering if I remember all my surprise encounters with animals in the wild.
I remember sitting totally still on a riverbank watching a platypus going about its business as the dusk descended, by a logging road on the boundary of Tasmania’s world heritage area. And a moose in the Yukon, blundering out of the scrub at full speed right in front of us, as terrified and surprised as we were. A huge thing, my vision filled with moose. It turned and kept bolting. And summer evenings camping on the Thredbo River where wombats make for strange silent sentinels, munching grass as humans rustle plastic and wrangle gas stoves, the fuss of cooking alfresco.
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04/10/2025 - 10:00
Guardian Australia is highlighting the plight of our endangered native species during an election campaign that is ignoring broken environment laws and rapidly declining ecosystems
Explore the series – Last chance: the extinction crisis being ignored this election
Get Guardian Australia environment editor Adam Morton’s Clear Air column as an email
A rare “bum-breathing” turtle found in a single river system in Queensland has suffered one of its worst breeding seasons on record due to flooding last December. It has prompted volunteers to question how many more “bad years” the species can survive.
A freshwater species that breathes by absorbing oxygen through gill-like structures in its tail, the Mary River turtle is endemic to south-east Queensland. Its population has fallen by more than 80% since the 1960s and its conservation status was upgraded from endangered to critically endangered last year.
Get Guardian Australia environment editor Adam Morton’s Clear Air column as an email
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04/10/2025 - 10:00
Agapanthus are daggy, environmental pests. Can we stop and think before these unsightly shrubs take over?
On my birthday I made time for my one true passion. Hating agapanthus.
I was walking my kids to school, taking time from their precious blink-and-you’ll-miss-it childhoods to seethe and take a picture of the revolting, saggy mess of agapanthus on the way. I have urgently supplied this picture to the Guardian and I’m ready and willing to speak out further.
Emily Mulligan is a writer from Sydney
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04/10/2025 - 10:00
Global research reveals most of 400m tonnes produced using fossil fuels, predominantly coal or oil
Less than 10% of the plastic produced around the world is made from recycled material, according to the first detailed global analysis of its life cycle.
The research reveals that most plastic is made from fossil fuels, predominantly coal and oil, despite rhetoric by producers, supermarkets and drinks companies about plastic being recycled.
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04/10/2025 - 10:00
In December 2024, when unseasonable flooding threatened the breeding season of a critically endangered turtle, Marilyn Connell and other members of a Queensland community conservation group sprang into action. The Mary river turtle is one of 2,000 Australian species listed as under threat in what scientists are calling an extinction crisis
‘Every year matters’: Queensland’s critically endangered ‘bum-breathing’ turtle battles the odds
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04/10/2025 - 06:00
John Todd’s eco-machine stunned experts by using natural organisms to remove toxic waste from a Cape Cod lagoon. Forty years on, he wants to build a fleet of them to clean up the oceans
John Todd remembers the moment he knew he was really on to something: “There was no question that it was at the Harwich dump in 1986,” he recalls. This was in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, close to where Todd still lives. Hidden away from the picturesque beaches was the town landfill, including lagoons of toxic waste from septic tanks, which was being left to seep into the groundwater below. So Todd, then a 45-year-old biologist, decided to design a solution. What he was “on to”, he came to realise, was not just a natural way of removing pollution from water, it was a holistic approach to environmental restoration that was way ahead of its time, and possibly still is.
An early eco-machine purifying toxic waste on Cape Cod in 1986. Photograph: John Todd
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