Verse’s connection to nature can inspire awareness and hope amid the climate crisis, offering clarity beyond data
Poetry has a big debt to nature, its muse and source of metaphor for centuries. As the UN climate conference begins, it is time to pay it back. Poetry must give nature a voice to express its dire predicament. “I will rise,” declares the furious river in the Scottish makar Kathleen Jamie’s poem What the Clyde Said, After Cop26 – just as the River Xanthus in Homer’s Iliad rose in revenge against Achilles for filling it with so many bodies.
Ms Jamie’s poem appears in a new anthology, Earth Prayers, edited by the former poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy. “We are in the age of anthropogenic climate breakdown, possibly the Age of Grief,” Ms Duffy writes in the foreword. The 100 poems, ranging from classics such as Matthew Arnold’s 1867 Dover Beach to #ExtinctionRebellion by Pascale Petit, remind us not just of the beauty of the natural world, but its fragility.
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Breaking Waves: Ocean News
11/10/2024 - 13:25
11/10/2024 - 11:00
Once heavily scorned because of fraud and poor outcomes, carbon trading is likely to be high on the agenda in Baku
For the next two weeks, countries will gather on the shores of the Caspian Sea in Baku, Azerbaijan, to discuss how to increase finance for climate crisis adaptation and mitigation. A global agreement on carbon markets will be high on the agenda as countries try to find ways of generating the trillions they need to decarbonise in order to limit heating to below 2C above preindustrial levels.
Here is what you need to know.
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11/10/2024 - 09:00
Australian Automobile Association analysis notes hybrids are exempt from fringe benefits tax until 1 April 2025
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Battery-powered electric vehicle sales fell sharply last quarter and may have temporarily peaked as consumers turn to hybrid models that attract tax concessions, according to new analysis.
Quarterly vehicle sales data released by the Australian Automobile Association on Monday reveals petrol-powered cars continued to decline in popularity, with sales falling by 9.16% in the three months to 30 September.
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11/10/2024 - 07:00
Annual bird survey suggests ‘particularly bad’ autumn on key migration route through city’s brightly lit skyscrapers
As fall bird migration nears its end in New York City, a troubling trend may be emerging: preliminary evidence suggest that more avians collided with buildings this season compared with last autumn.
NYC Bird Alliance surveys suggest that collisions are up citywide and that it has proved to be a “particularly bad” autumn for collisions. While spring 2024 showed fewer collisions than in 2023, about 60-75% of such accidents occur during fall migration, which peaks from early September to October.
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11/10/2024 - 07:00
Crucial question for summit will be how to help developing countries cope with extreme weather caused by high temperatures
Cop29 officially opens on Monday 11 November in Baku, Azerbaijan, and the conference is scheduled to end on 22 November, although it is likely to run later. World leaders – about 100 have said they will turn up – are expected in the first three days, and after that the crunch negotiations will be carried on by their representatives, mostly environment ministers or other high-ranking officials.
The crucial question for the summit is climate finance. Developing countries want assurances that trillions will flow to them in the next decade to help them cut greenhouse gas emissions in line with the rapidly receding hope of limiting global heating to 1.5C above preindustrial levels, and to enable them to cope with the increasingly evident extreme weather that rising temperatures are driving.
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11/10/2024 - 00:00
The region’s president responds to criticisms that he was slow to act by attacking the prime minister
The sun still hadn’t risen on Tuesday 29 October when the mayor of Utiel, Ricardo Gabaldón, took another look at the warnings from Spain’s state meteorological office and ordered all the schools in the small Valencian town to close.
“The warning early that morning – at 5am or 6am – was orange,” he said. “That’s when I was weighing up whether to close the schools here. In the end, I ordered them to close at six or seven that morning. Soon after, the alert went red.”
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11/09/2024 - 15:50
Ten people have been injured so far by the Mountain fire, which was 17% contained by Saturday morning
As firefighting crews continued to battle the Mountain fire on Saturday, some residents were allowed to return to areas destroyed by the blaze to sift through the destruction to their homes.
As of 7am Pacific time on Saturday, the fire had been 17% contained, according to Cal Fire, the state’s wildfire-fighting agency.
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11/09/2024 - 15:00
Shadow cabinet secretary Claire Coutinho accepted donation from Lord Bamford while overseeing millions awarded to his family businesses in green grants
A Conservative former cabinet minister who took donations from the billionaire boss of the JCB digger dynasty – including a £7,000 trip on his VIP private helicopter – oversaw decisions to award his family’s business empire millions in taxpayer-funded green energy grants.
Claire Coutinho also posed for pictures promoting Lord Bamford’s personal £100m hydrogen engine project and accepted a £7,500 donation from JCB to her local election campaign while she was the energy secretary in Rishi Sunak’s government.
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11/09/2024 - 14:00
Energy secretary says Britain must work on vital alliances with other countries following victory of climate-denier Trump
The UK must ramp up its efforts on renewable energy to foster national security in an increasingly uncertain world, the energy secretary, Ed Miliband, has warned, on the eve of a fraught global summit on the climate crisis.
He pledged that the UK would lead efforts at Cop29 to secure the global agreement needed to stave off the worst impacts of climate breakdown, in talks that have been thrown into turmoil by the re-election of Donald Trump as US president.
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11/09/2024 - 14:00
The lesson of his first term is that he does what he says he is going to do: the UK must prepare
Wednesday 9 November 2016: a misty, drizzly day in Washington DC, an overwhelmingly Democrat city in trauma after the shock victory of Donald Trump in the election the previous day. A Washington rarity, a declared Trump supporter, was among a group of guests for lunch in the residence that day. I took him aside and asked whether Trump would be as radical and disruptive as the giants of American political journalism were predicting. “Not at all,” he said: “I know the guy. All that red meat was just for the campaign. I expect him to govern as a mainstream Republican.”
Fast forward to London, Wednesday 6 November 2024. I’m speaking at a business dinner about the election outcome and what will come next. I mention Trump’s commitment to levy 20% tariffs on all imports into America. One participant says he has just spoken to a friend in Arizona who knows Trump personally. This friend has said: “It’s not about instant action. Trump will use the tariffs as a threat, to persuade countries to act to get trade flows into balance.” Another participant says: “Trump has won his second term now. So he doesn’t need to fight any more. Surely he’ll calm down and focus on his legacy?”
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