Breaking Waves: Ocean News

Minor party’s offer, which includes ban on native-forest logging, represents its second concession on stalled legislation in less than a week Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast The Greens have dropped their demand for a climate trigger to be incorporated in the government’s stalled Nature Positive legislation, indicating they are now prepared to pass the bills in return for a Australia-wide ban on native-forest logging alone. The party has previously refused to support Labor’s legislation, insisting that both a climate trigger and forest-logging ban must be included. Sign up for Guardian Australia’s breaking news email Continue reading...

Union leader says anger is unprecedented, but does not condone any plan to stop food reaching supermarkets The president of the National Farmers’ Union (NFU) has said that farmers in England and Wales feel “betrayed” by changes to inheritance tax rules, while saying his organisation does not condone mooted plans to stop food reaching supermarket shelves. Tom Bradshaw, the NFU president, said anger among farmers about the changes announced in last month’s budget over inheritance tax and farms was unprecedented, and that he understood why many members wanted to take action. Continue reading...

The grim negotiations in Baku, Azerbaijan, have shown the need for reform of the UN annual global climate talks ‘Global emissions continue to increase, carbon sinks are being degraded and we can no longer exclude the possibility of surpassing 2.9C of warming by 2100.” It is a bleak assessment of our planet’s future and could have been made by just about any environmental organisation on Earth. In fact, they are the views of an international group of climate experts that highlight, in sharp detail, the manifest failings of the UN’s annual Cop climate summits, whose 29th iteration is now being staged in Baku, Azerbaijan. These talks, they said last week, are no longer fit for purpose and need an urgent overhaul. Continue reading...

Piles of loo paper, a years worth of tinned good and snake-proof boots. No wonder prepping has become a lifestyle choice Prepping – I’m coming round to it. I’ve had Prepare, the old government website that Oliver Dowden launched this spring, open on my laptop in a quivering tab for a while now, and this week I’ve been dipping in every now and then to remind myself of “how to prepare for an emergency”. How many bottles of water we may need, tweezers, a sage reminder about the fact of tinned meat. I’ve dabbled in prepping before, without really realising what I was doing. A fear in the early 2000s that Rimmel might stop making my favourite eyeliner led to me dashing to Boots to buy five. Which is fairly normal, I think? On the spectrum of normal? Sensible probably, when so many, as you’ll know, have brushes too fine or ink that disappears in rain. In the grip of lockdown, as supermarket deliveries were increasingly scarce, when I was blessed with a Tesco slot I would focus not on toilet paper or flour, but on treats. I’d stockpile the good biscuits, and, in my naivety, Biscoff spread. I remember there were very large gift bars of Galaxy chocolate on offer for a while, bars the size of a small dinghy which I would buy in bulk, nibbling away at the corners like a parasite. That was when we started decanting our pulses. Still, beside the microwave sits a proud wall of oversized Tupperware, carefully labelled in my six-year-old daughter’s handwriting: “spageti”, “green lenttles”, “ryce”. It felt good. I felt prepared, but for what, was unclear. Continue reading...