‘Stone age’ system of booking cross-border rail tickets holding back climate action by consumers, says thinktank
Europe’s “stone age” system of booking train tickets makes it needlessly difficult for travellers to avoid polluting flights, a report has found.
Booking equivalent train tickets is “difficult or impossible” on almost half of the EU’s busiest international air routes, analysis from the Transport & Environment (T&E) thinktank shows.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Former UN climate chief to co-chair Lancet Commission examining how sea-level rise is reshaping health, wellbeing and inequality
What are the health impacts of sea-level rise, and who should pay?
Christiana Figueres: Sea-level rise is a health crisis and we must hold polluters accountable
Countries are being “held hostage” by their reliance on fossil fuels, a former UN climate chief has warned, describing the health impacts of climate change as “the mother of all injustices”.
Christiana Figueres, an international climate negotiator who helped deliver the Paris agreement signed in 2016, made the comments as she was announced on Wednesday as co-chair of a Lancet Commission examining how sea-level rise is reshaping health, wellbeing and inequality.
Continue reading...Proposal, a win for RFK Jr’s Maha movement, is a ‘first step’ toward tackling plastic pollution, advocates say
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed on Thursday to include microplastics and pharmaceuticals on a list of contaminants in drinking water for the first time, a step that could lead to new limits on those substances for water utilities.
Lee Zeldin, the EPA administrator, said the agency was responding to Americans who have worried about plastics and pharmaceuticals in their drinking water. The gesture also aims to hand a win to health secretary Robert FKennedy Jr’s Maha movement, which for months has pressured Zeldin to further crack down on environmental contaminants.
Continue reading...Critics say exemption for fossil fuels exploits White House’s ‘self-made gas crisis’, and could doom the rare Rice’s whale
A US government panel on Tuesday exempted oil and gas drilling in the Gulf of Mexico from the Endangered Species Act (ESA), a move which critics say could doom a rare whale species and harm other marine life.
The Endangered Species Committee – which had not convened in more than three decades – voted to approve the request for the ESA exemption at the request of the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth.
Continue reading...With anger stoked by Channel 4’s drama Dirty Business, we look at what has happened to some of the main players
Water companies have been in the public eye for the wrong reasons again recently. South West Water was in the dock pleading guilty to supplying water unfit for human consumption, while the regulator fined South East Water £22.5m for repeated supply failures that affected more than 280,000 people over three years.
As the full scale of the sewage pollution scandal has been revealed to the public over the past six years, key figures working for the regulators and the privatised companies have been heavily criticised. Channel 4’s drama Dirty Business has focused attention on individuals at the heart of the scandal.
Continue reading...Proposed package comes after regulator finds ‘serious and unacceptable breaches’ in how company operates
Welsh Water is to pay a proposed £44.7m after the industry regulator found “serious and unacceptable” breaches in the supplier’s sewage and network services.
Ofwat said Dŵr Cymru Welsh Water failed to properly operate, maintain and upgrade its wastewater network to ensure it could cope with levels of sewage and wastewater, and did not have adequate processes in place or oversight by senior bosses.
Continue reading...Private equity group EQT to take 42% stake as supplier faces scrutiny over environmental record and CEO’s pay
A leading European investor will pump fresh funding into Yorkshire Water including helping to cover a £600m loan, despite recent heavy sewage fines and a scandal over executive pay at the utility company.
EQT, a Swedish private equity group, said on Monday it would take a 42% stake in Kelda Holdings, the Jersey-registered parent company of Yorkshire Water, which has 5.7 million customers across Yorkshire and parts of the East Midlands and Lincolnshire.
Continue reading...Vermont and New York face high stakes to protect climate superfund laws as it faces attacks from Trump’s DoJ
By rolling back a bedrock climate legal determination, the Trump administration has undercut its attacks on a groundbreaking state climate accountability law, green groups have argued in court.
Trump’s justice department has asked a judge to kill a first-of-its-kind 2024 Vermont “climate superfund” policy requiring major polluters to pay for damages caused by their past planet-heating pollution, partly on the grounds that that federal law, not state law, governs greenhouse gas emissions. But last month, Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) repealed the endangerment finding, the scientific determination giving federal officials the authority to control those very pollutants.
Continue reading...At least eight councils receive legal threats alleging flyers criticising wood burners are in breach of advertising codes
Lobbyists for the UK wood-burning stove industry have threatened councils with legal action over public information campaigns warning of the harms of air pollution.
At least eight councils have received legal threats, according to research by the British Medical Journal (BMJ). The Stove Industry Association (SIA), which represents the UK’s expanding industry around the burning of wood in domestic settings, wrote to the councils, all London boroughs, in late 2023 complaining that flyers stating wood burners were “careless, not cosy” were in breach of UK advertising codes.
Continue reading...Dublin, Helsinki, Stockholm and Tallinn among port cities more choked by sulphur oxides from ferries, analysis shows
Fume-belching ferries spew more sulphur pollution than cars in several EU capitals, analysis has found.
Dublin, Helsinki, Stockholm and Tallinn are among 13 of Europe’s 15 biggest port cities choked more by sulphur oxides (SOx) from ferries than road vehicles, data shared exclusively with the Guardian shows.
Continue reading...As the drama shows, private firms no longer able to pollute the coast of England of Wales just switched to rivers instead
There is a moment in Channel 4’s drama Dirty Business when Julie Maughan holds the body of her dead child and lets out an anguished cry. It is as brutal as it is compelling.
Her eight-year-old daughter Heather had just died in hospital, two weeks after playing in the sea on the beach at Dawlish Warren in Devon, where she contracted E coli O157, a bug which comes from raw sewage. She became ill with diarrhoea and blood loss. Transferred to Bristol children’s hospital, her parents agreed to switch off her life-support machine after she suffered kidney failure and brain damage.
Continue reading...Shrimp soundtrack will be played under water to lure baby oysters in program aimed at fighting algal blooms
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South Australians are being urged to feast on local oysters and then donate the shells to restore native reefs, which will filter ocean water and help fight harmful algal blooms.
The program will also involve lumps of limestone being sunk in the ocean, with a soundtrack of snapping shrimp playing on underwater speakers to lure baby oysters in.
Continue reading...Environmental charity Fidra says 168 of 195 SSSIs it surveyed are contaminated with tiny pellets
Plastic nurdles have been found in 84% of important nature sites surveyed in the UK.
Nurdles are tiny pellets that the plastics industry uses to make larger products. They were found in 168 of 195 sites of special scientific interest (SSSIs), so named because of the rare wildlife they harbour. They are given extra protections in an effort to protect them from pollution.
Continue reading...Ford denies having created ‘defeat devices’ in legal action on behalf of 1.6 million owners against five carmakers
About a million Ford diesel cars were sold in the UK with serious defects in components supposed to curb toxic exhaust emissions, the high court has been told.
The highly polluting vehicles were produced and sold between 2016 and 2018 after Ford’s engineers became aware of the issues, and many were never formally recalled or fixed, lawyers said.
Continue reading...The failure by state governments to do anything about pollution means it has often been met with apathy. But at a rare protest anger and frustration were rife
As a familiar smoky evening haze gathered over Delhi, the crowd began to assemble in their hundreds. Mothers and children, students, retirees and environmentalists were all united by a basic but desperate demand: the right to breathe safely in India’s capital.
“Delhi is not a liveable city any more, it’s a death trap,” said Radhika Aggarwal, 33, an engineer who joined the protest on Sunday.
Continue reading...River Action bringing legal action against water regulator over who should foot bill for firms’ past failures to invest
Ofwat is unlawfully allowing water companies to charge customers twice to fund more than £100bn of investment to reduce sewage pollution, campaigners will allege in court on Tuesday.
Lawyers for River Action say the bill increases being allowed by Ofwat – which amount to an average of £123 a year per household – mean customers will be paying again for improvements to achieve environmental compliance that should have been funded from their previous bills.
Continue reading...Claimants seek compensation from RWE and Heidelberg Materials after extreme flooding destroyed harvests
A group of Pakistani farmers whose livelihoods were devastated by floods three years ago has fired the starting shot in legal action against two of Germany’s most polluting companies.
Lawyers acting for 43 men and women from the Sindh region sent the energy firm RWE and the cement producer Heidelberg formal letters before action on Tuesday warning of their intention to sue later this year.
Continue reading...Peers say ‘woeful’ record on prosecutions has led to a ‘low-risk, high-reward’ criminal culture
Organised crime groups in the UK are making millions every year from illegally dumping and burning rubbish, peers have told ministers, after an inquiry found a lack of enforcement made it a “low-risk, high-reward” criminal enterprise.
“Criminality is endemic in the waste sector,” a Lords committee told the government on Tuesday, after it found at least 38m tonnes of waste was illegally managed every year, “leading to serious environmental, economic and social consequences”.
Continue reading...Air breathed by people in the city categorised as ‘severe’ in quality after fireworks contribute to thick smog
Delhi awoke to a thick haze on Tuesday, a day after millions of people celebrated the Hindu festival of Diwali with fireworks, marking the beginning of the pollution season that has become an annual blight on India’s capital.
Those in the most polluted city in the world once again found themselves breathing dangerously toxic air that fell into the “severe” category on Tuesday morning.
Continue reading...Environment Agency says pollutant in Norfolk river is ‘an unknown substance’ and is investigating
Dead fish have been found on a river in Norfolk where a large stretch of white foam appeared, the Environment Agency has confirmed.
Images shared by the agency on Saturday showed the foam covering an area of the River Thet.
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