The Guardian Climate Change

Living in an energy-efficient zero-carbon home with an air source heat pump has cut energy bills drastically

• Are heat pumps the future or just a lot of hot air?

This Monday, it will be two years since Julian and Juliette Rayner moved into their new zero-carbon home on a development about 20 minutes drive from Bristol.

The property boasts a range of new technologies that makes it highly energy-efficient and enable the couple to generate their own electricity and live a greener lifestyle.

Supporters rally to Rachel Kyte after criticism of appointment over link to investment firm Quadrature Capital

The UK’s new climate envoy will retain her role on the board of a charity whose founders made a multimillion-pound donation to the Labour party and have investments in fossil fuels, the Guardian has learned.

Rachel Kyte, the former World Bank climate chief who was announced as the UK’s special representative on climate this week, is on the climate advisory board of Quadrature Climate Foundation, a charity set up by the founders of the Quadrature Capital investment company.

September has offered little reprieve after a sweltering summer, with Las Vegas on 102nd day of temperatures above 100F

Brutal heat continues to plague the south-west US, with excessive heat alerts lingering long into September as parts of the region set grim new records for deaths connected to the sweltering temperatures.

Autumn has offered little reprieve for cities that have already spent months mired in triple-digit temperatures. This week, Las Vegas, Nevada; Phoenix, Arizona; and Palm Springs, California, are all grappling with severe weather, with highs that have pushed over 100F (38C). More than 16 million people in the US were under heat alerts on Friday, according to the National Weather Service, mostly clustered in the southern tips of Nevada, Arizona and California.

The Middle East crisis, Russian drone attacks in Kyiv, Hurricane Helene and Paris fashion week: the last seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists

Storm made landfall in Florida Thursday and has caused deaths, damage and about 4m power outages in multiple states

• Hurricane Helene – live updates

Helene has reportedly killed at least 10 people and inflicted more than 4m power outages across the south-eastern US after crashing ashore in north-western Florida late on Thursday as a potent category 4 hurricane, according to officials.

The storm – which registered maximum sustained winds of 140mph – had weakened to a tropical storm over Georgia early on Friday, when residents whose communities experienced Helene’s peak effects more directly were only just beginning to fathom the recovery process ahead.

Builders already have the tools needed to build cooler homes for an increasingly hotter world

The US sweltered under record-breaking heat this year, with new research suggesting that air conditioning is no longer enough to keep homes cool. Spiraling energy demands and costs of indoor cooling now have planners looking to alternative ways to keep buildings cool – some fresh out of the lab, others centuries old.

“The amount of buildings we expect to go up in the next couple decades is just staggering,” says Alexi Miller, director of building innovation at the non-profit New Buildings Institute (NBI). “If we build them the way we built them yesterday, we’re going to use a phenomenal amount of energy. There are lots of ways we could be doing this better. It’s not all fancy, emerging technology – there’s some basic stuff we don’t do nearly enough.”

Environment has barely figured in leadership campaign but soon the party must decide where it stands

• UK politics live – latest updates

When the Conservatives gather in Birmingham this weekend for their first party conference out of government in 15 years, the environment is not likely to be top of most members’ minds, amid the fever of a leadership campaign.

That is probably a good thing, many green-tinged Tory insiders feel. The leadership campaign is dominated by the right wing of the party, with the favourite, Robert Jenrick, slugging it out on issues such as immigration, Brexit and the “scourge of woke” with Kemi Badenoch, James Cleverly and Tom Tugendhat.

Climate activists opposed to the Mountain Valley pipeline were accused of breaking West Virginia’s new critical infrastructure law

• Revealed: how the fossil fuel industry helps spread anti-protest laws across the US

It was around dawn on a chilly day last November when West Virginia state troopers forcibly extricated Jerome Wagner out from a 25ft-deep pit where he was locked to a drilling machine being used to finish construction of a beleaguered gas pipeline.

The veteran climate activist was trying to draw attention to the Mountain Valley pipeline (MVP) – a 300-mile (480km) fossil fuel project mired by environmental controversies and blocked by court orders and regulatory red tape until it was pushed through by the Biden administration in mid-2023.

There is little difference between this government’s and its Conservative predecessor’s policies on expansion

There seems to be no difference between Conservative and Labour policies on nuclear power. Both support the current building of Hinkley Point C in Somerset, the planned Sizewell C station in Suffolk, an unspecified number of small modular reactors all over Britain as well as the far-off dream of nuclear fusion.

However, few scientists serious about the threat of the climate crisis believe new nuclear power stations are part of the solution in reducing carbon output. Building them is too slow and costly, while solar and wind are quicker and cheaper in making a dent in fossil fuel consumption and eliminating it.

Forecasters warn that storm, one of the most powerful to hit the US this year, could create a ‘nightmare’

• Tell us: have you been affected by Hurricane Helene?

Hurricane Helene strengthened to a catastrophic category 4 storm as it barreled toward Florida’s Gulf coast, making it one of the most powerful storms to hit the US this year.

The storm is expected to make landfall on Thursday night. Forecasters warn the enormous storm could create a “nightmare” scenario, with a potentially life-threatening storm surge that could reach 15-20ft (4.6-6.1 meters) in the Big Bend area of Florida’s Panhandle region.

The stylish Populus hotel boasts eco-friendly construction and tree planting for every guest. Is this the hospitality of the future – or hot air?

Travelers to Denver, Colorado, will soon have the opportunity to spend the night in what promises to be “the first carbon positive hotel in America”. So say the creators behind Populus, a new 265-room, stylish, yet climate-conscious luxury hotel in the heart of the city.

Set to open in mid-October, the building is a striking addition to the city’s skyline – a sleek, three-corner structure built to resemble a grove of aspen trees, with each window shaped like the tree’s iconic “knots”. Its climate claims, too, are equally provocative. The hotel’s creators have promised to overcompensate for their emissions by a factor of 400% to 500%, through a combination of low-carbon construction, eco-friendly operations and a huge tree planting campaign throughout Colorado.

Lobbyists and lawmakers have coordinated to enact new laws that increase criminal penalties for peaceful protests

Fossil fuel lobbyists coordinated with lawmakers behind the scenes and across state lines to push and shape laws that are escalating a crackdown on peaceful protests against oil and gas expansion, a new Guardian investigation reveals.

Records obtained by the Guardian show that lobbyists working for major North American oil and gas companies were key architects of anti-protest laws that increase penalties and could lead to non-violent environmental and climate activists being imprisoned up to 10 years.

On my return to the UK from Brazil I’ve seen how northern latitudes are behaving like the equatorial margins

Returning to British suburbia from the Brazilian Amazon is always disconcerting, but it has been doubly weird in the past few days because the London commuter belt has been inundated with volumes of rain that normally belong in the tropics.

Mini-tornadoes, flash floods and the dumping of a month’s worth of rain in a single day have flooded transport hubs, high street pubs, and the shrubs of semidetached homes.

Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough!

It isn’t fit for humans now,

Lilly, an 8.5-metre tall puppet designed to help children talk about the environment, provokes mixed response

They say it is rude to comment on a baby’s appearance but that has not stopped the residents of Rochdale, who awoke on Wednesday to a “freaky” new arrival.

Lilly, an 8.5-metre tall puppet designed to help children talk about the environment, went on display in the town centre to a somewhat bewildered response.

Ethanol made from maize has been touted as a green fuel, but a closer look at its production puts paid to this claim

Ethanol made from corn was touted as a clean, renewable fuel for vehicles. Because the maize plants absorb carbon dioxide as they grow they were deemed environmentally friendly, and this is now big business in the US where billions of gallons of ethanol are blended into nearly all petrol supplies.

The problem is that actually ethanol is worse for the climate than petrol. Growing maize and producing ethanol from its starch ends up creating more greenhouse gas emissions than petrol – tilling the land for maize releases carbon in the soil, fertilisers produce their own emissions and emissions are given off when ethanol is burned in engines.

US president also mocks former president’s windmill conspiracy theories at Climate Week event in New York

Joe Biden has lauded the US’s progress in fighting the climate crisis during his presidency, while also criticizing Donald Trump for his dismissal of the “more dangerous world” that global heating poses to future generations.

The US president was speaking at a Bloomberg event on Tuesday being held as part of Climate Week in New York, a summit that runs alongside the United Nations general assembly, which the US president spoke at earlier in the day.

In 27 states, utilities can disconnect power for non-payment on the hottest days, which can have deadly consequences

Michael Crowley runs his air conditioner nonstop on hot summer days to keep his cat, Arya, comfortable. But when the Richmond, Virginia, chef got home after work on 7 August 2022, it “felt like 100 degrees”. His power was out. He phoned his leasing office and was told his electricity bill was unpaid.

Crowley protested, saying his utilities had long been covered by his rent check. But then he learned his building’s new property manager required tenants to pay for power separately – something Crowley said was unclear. No one told him about the delinquent bill, he said.

Letter says technologies to produce blue hydrogen and capture CO2 are unproven and could hinder net zero efforts

Leading climate scientists are urging the government to pause plans for a billion pound investment in “green technologies” they say are unproven and would make it harder for the UK to reach its net zero targets.

Labour has promised to invest £1bn in carbon capture, usage and storage (CCUS) to produce blue hydrogen and to capture carbon dioxide from new gas-fired power stations – with a decision on the first tranche of the funding expected imminently.

Lock the UK into fossil fuel production for generations to come.

Result in huge upstream emissions from methane leaks, transport and processing of liquefied natural gas (LNG) from the US.

Rely on carbon capture and storage (CCS) during the production of hydrogen – technology they say has been abandoned in the vast majority of similar projects around the world.

Pose a danger to the public if there are any leaks from pipes carrying the captured carbon. At least 45 people had to be taken to hospital after a leak in the US.

Nine climate protesters have stopped a coal train headed to the Port of Newcastle in opposition to the federal government’s approval of three new mining projects. Rising Tide, the group behind the move, said in a statement that the three projects – Whitehaven Coal’s Narrabri thermal coal project to 2066, Mach Energy’s Mount Pleasant thermal coal project to 2058 and Yancoal’s Ashton coal project to 2064 – would create 1.4bn tonnes of emissions

• Tanya Plibersek approves three coalmine expansions in move criticised as ‘the opposite of climate action’

Until the government changes its stance on the environment and the war in Gaza and Lebanon, there is nothing to celebrate

On Monday morning, we walked into the main hall of Labour’s annual conference in Liverpool, before the keynote speech of the chancellor, Rachel Reeves. What we did next, you might have seen.

Shortly after Reeves began her address, two of us stood to speak out on Labour’s complicity in suspected Israeli war crimes, and the party’s ties to climate-wrecking corporations. We were there on behalf of Climate Resistance, a group campaigning to end the cosy relationship between politics and the fossil fuel industry. Just like arms manufacturers, oil companies have been guilty of hindering democratic processes with donations and lobbying, putting human lives on the line for their own profits.

Jack McGinn is a climate activist with Climate Resistance

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