The Guardian Climate Change

More than 95% of investors urged commodities firm to keep highly profitable fossil fuel arm to help maximise shareholder cash

Glencore has scrapped plans to spin off its coal business after shareholders urged the commodities company to hold on to the highly profitable but heavily polluting division.

The FTSE 100 company said that an overwhelming majority of its shareholders favoured retaining the coal business over its plan to list the division as a separate company on the New York stock exchange.

This has been a summer of extreme heat around the world. The Guardian is investigating how it harms our planet and leaves the world’s most vulnerable people exposed to its impact

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A staple of dystopian science fictions is an inner sanctum of privilege and an outer world – chemical desert/airless waste/District 12 – peopled by the desperate poor. The insiders, living off the exploited labour of the outlands, are indifferent to the horrors beyond their walls. Well, here we are.

Even as extreme heat raged across the southern United States this summer, the governors of Florida and Texas struck down heat protections for outdoor workers. Construction companies and agricultural firms lobbied against the rights of workers to water, shade and rest breaks when temperatures soar – and Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott, two men also lavishly funded by the fossil fuel industry, gave them what they wanted.

Kamala Harris’s running mate boasts a strong record on climate policy and green energy as Minnesota governor

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Tim Walz, tapped as Vice-President Kamala Harris’s running mate on Tuesday, may not be a household name, but the Minnesota governor is well known as a climate champion in green advocacy circles.

“Like Vice-President Harris, Governor Walz knows that climate change is the existential threat of our time,” the Sierra Club executive director, Ben Jealous, said in a statement. “The Harris-Walz ticket is one that understands the fight before us.”

Gardeners and pest controllers say wasps, important predators and pollinators, appear to be in sharp decline

The UK is not doing enough to track wasp populations as numbers appear to plummet, a leading expert has warned.

While there were national monitoring schemes for some invertebrates, including bees and butterflies, there was no such programme in place for wasps, said Dr Gavin Broad, principal curator of wasps at the Natural History Museum.

Our former environment correspondent had solar panels installed in 2010 and later added a heat pump. He’s totted up the energy generated and cash saved over the years

An abiding memory of a day in August 2010, the first time my solar panels were connected to the grid, was of the builders downing tools and watching the electricity meter whiz round backwards.

It was a sunny day and they were supposed to be finishing the plastering and insulation, but the novel sight of the old-style electricity meter in reverse was too entertaining.