Banks may follow suit after UK weather-related claims on home insurance reach new high
Britain’s biggest building society has stopped granting mortgages on some properties where there is a high risk of flooding but said this affected only “a very limited number” of homes.
Nationwide’s head of property risk, Rob Stevens, said the lender used mapping technology to identify which homes were vulnerable to flooding, and it would decline to grant a mortgage to buy a property it deemed to be at high risk.
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Breaking Waves: Ocean News
04/30/2024 - 08:29
Gardeners’ World presenter Arit Anderson creating colourful display to encourage gardeners to move away from peat
A completely peat-free garden will be showcased at the Hampton Court Palace flower show so the public can “have a chat about peat-free gardening” and learn how to do it themselves.
Peat-free compost has been a divisive topic in the gardening world, with some gardeners arguing that it is not as good as the peaty stuff for growing plants.
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04/30/2024 - 08:25
Agency announces rule on methylene chloride, colorless liquid used for stripping paint, cleaning metal and decaffeinating coffee
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced on Tuesday that it will ban most uses of methylene chloride, a colorless liquid used for stripping paint, cleaning metal, and even decaffeinating coffee. The chemical has been linked to dozens of deaths and advocates have long called for its ban.
The new rule will require stronger worker safety protections from the harmful carcinogen for the remaining “critical” uses. All consumer use will be prohibited within a year, while most commercial and industrial use will be phased out within the next two years.
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04/30/2024 - 08:00
Internal documents revealed by committee show companies lobbied against climate laws they publicly claimed to support
Big oil has privately acknowledged its efforts to downplay the dangers of burning fossil fuels, US Democrats have found.
Major fossil-fuel firms have also pledged support for international climate efforts, but internally admit these efforts are incompatible with their own climate plans. And they have lobbied against climate laws and regulations they have publicly claimed to support, documents newly revealed by the committee show.
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04/30/2024 - 07:00
National Park Service will reintroduce bears to Washington’s North Cascades and won’t remove horses from North Dakota park
Wildlife advocates are celebrating “incredible” news for the preservation of threatened bears, and a herd of historically significant wild horses, in separate north-western and upper midwestern national parks.
In North Dakota, the National Parks Service (NPS) has dropped a plan that would have seen about 200 wild horses, descended from those belonging to Native American tribes who fought the 1876 Great Sioux war, rounded up and removed from Theodore Roosevelt national park.
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04/30/2024 - 06:42
The far right are on the march in Germany and the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany has become the most popular party in several states. Immigration and a sense of being economically left behind have been driving factors in the rise in popularity but the Green party and the federal government’s climate policies have also borne the brunt of public anger. The Guardian travelled to Görlitz, on the German border with Poland, to find out to what extent Germany’s green policies are fuelling the far right
• How climate policies are becoming focus for far-right attacks in Germany
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04/30/2024 - 06:00
The state’s last sugar processing mill closed because there’s just not enough water in the Rio Grande to share between the US and Mexico
Tudor Uhlhorn has been too busy auctioning off agricultural equipment to grieve the “death” of Texas’s last sugar mill.
“I’m as sad as anyone else,” said the chairman of the board of the Rio Grande Valley Sugar Growers cooperative, which owns the now-shuttered mill in Santa Rosa, a small town about 40 miles from Brownsville. “I just haven’t had a whole lot of time to mourn.”
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04/30/2024 - 05:00
Nitrogen, phosphorus, chloride, oil and cyanide among the 371m lb of pollutants released by just 41 plants in five years
Tyson Foods dumped millions of pounds of toxic pollutants directly into American rivers and lakes over the last five years, threatening critical ecosystems, endangering wildlife and human health, a new investigation reveals.
Nitrogen, phosphorus, chloride, oil and cyanide were among the 371m lb of pollutants released into waterways by just 41 Tyson slaughterhouses and mega processing plants between 2018 and 2022.
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04/30/2024 - 04:57
Campaigners say last-minute compromise plays into the hands of petrostates and industry influences
Campaigners are blaming developed countries for capitulating at the last minute to pressure from fossil fuel and industry lobbyists, and slowing progress towards the first global treaty to cut plastic waste.
Delegates concluded talks in Ottawa, Canada, late on Monday, with no agreement on a proposal for global reductions in the $712bn (£610bn) plastic production industry by 2040 to address twin issues of plastic waste and huge carbon emissions.
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04/30/2024 - 04:41
Clean Water Alliance lays out three-part strategy for action
‘Further and faster action on pollution’ needed, says group
Seven water-based sports, including British Rowing, British Triathlon and Swim England, have formed an alliance to demand the government go “further and faster” in tackling water pollution.
It comes less than a month after the Boat Race was marred by Oxford men’s crew getting sick with E Coli amid high levels of sewage in the Thames, and with concerns mounting over huge levels of sewage in Britain’s rivers, lakes and coastal waters. Last month an Environment Agency report also found that raw sewage was discharged for more than 3.6m hours into rivers and seas last year, a 105% increase on the previous 12 months.
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