Progressives must wage a battle against a rotten capitalist system that milks our resources – and destroys lives. Let the fightback start with water
In more than a decade as an MP, I have attended hundreds of meetings in parliament. Most pass. Some linger. Few stay with you. But a recent event was very different.
We hosted the actors, the real-life people they portrayed and the production team behind the Channel 4 docudrama Dirty Business. It tells the story of campaigners and families who have spent years fighting not just privatised water companies, but a system that was meant to protect them – and has too often failed.
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Breaking Waves: Ocean News
03/26/2026 - 08:24
03/26/2026 - 07:00
Exclusive: Paul Marshall also challenged over his own ‘misleading’ statements and £1.8bn of fossil fuel investments in his hedge fund
The co-owner of GB News and “committed” Christian Sir Paul Marshall has been criticised by a group of church leaders over the TV channel’s attacks on climate science and action.
The hedge fund manager was also challenged over his own statements, which were called “misleading”, by the 100-strong group, which includes the former archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams and two current bishops.
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03/26/2026 - 06:51
Firm’s sales up 54% this month and Good Energy reports doubling of interest in solar after latest oil price shock
Solar panel sales have risen sharply since the start of the Iran war, according to Octopus Energy, and households are opting for bigger arrays of roof panels.
Sales were up 54% so far this month compared with the same period last month, the company said on Thursday.
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03/26/2026 - 06:49
Campaigners criticise frequent use of storm overflows when parts of the country were in drought for months
Raw sewage was discharged into rivers and seas almost 300,000 times last year after the driest spring for more than 100 years and the sunniest and warmest year on record in England.
Water companies released raw sewage into rivers and seas from storm overflows – designed to be used in extreme wet weather conditions – 291,492 times. This was a 35% reduction on record spills in 2024. Average discharges were 20.5 spills for each overflow, compared with 31.8 in the previous year.
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03/25/2026 - 11:00
US, top carbon emitter in history, has ‘a lot of responsibility’ for causing ‘substantial’ harm globally, scientist says
The US has caused an eye-watering $10tn in global damages to the world over the past three decades through its vast planet-heating emissions, with a quarter of this economic pain inflicted upon itself, new research has found.
By being the largest carbon emitter in history, the US has caused greater harm to worldwide economic growth than any other country, ahead of China, now the world’s largest emitter that is responsible for $9tn in GDP damage since 1990, according to the findings of the paper.
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03/25/2026 - 10:00
A long-running experiment in Colorado provides an ‘alarming’ view of how rapidly unchecked global heating could transform fragile ecosystems
Every summer, people descend on the wildflower capital of Colorado to see grasslands flush with corn lilies, aspen sunflowers and sub-alpine larkspur. In January 1991, scientists set up a unique experiment in these Rocky Mountain meadows. It was one of the first (and longest running) to work out how the changing climate would affect an ecosystem.
At the time, it was believed a temperature increase could lead to longer, lusher grasses. But instead of flourishing, the grasses and wildflowers started to disappear, replaced by sage brush. The experimental meadows morphed into a desert-like scrubland. Even the fungi in the soils were transformed by heat.
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03/25/2026 - 02:00
Constituents’ frustration with Richard Tice reflects growing problem for party and its leaders’ climate-sceptic stance
“The worst part of it was the smell,” says Audrey Crook, 58. A full-time carer who lives with her 20-year-old son, Crook woke up at 11pm one night to find a foot of flood water on the ground floor of her home. “It was like black water. It had sewage and everything in it, it was absolutely disgusting.”
Crook’s home – along with more than 30 others on Wyberton West Road and Park Road in Boston, Lincolnshire – was flooded in January last year when heavy rain swept across the region, raising river levels and exceeding flood defences.
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03/25/2026 - 02:00
The fragility of the global food system fills me with dread – and the war with Iran has exposed just how close to collapse it is
The fate of environmentalists is to spend their lives trying not to be proved right. Vindication is what we dread. But there’s one threat that haunts me more than any other: the collapse of the global food system. We cannot predict what the immediate trigger might be. But the war with Iran is just the right kind of event.
Drawing on years of scientific data, I’ve been arguing for some time that this risk exists – and that governments are completely unprepared for it. In 2023, I made a submission to a parliamentary inquiry into environmental change and food security, with a vast list of references. Called as a witness, I spent much of the time explaining that the issue was much wider than the inquiry’s scope.
George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist
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03/25/2026 - 00:00
I had to deal with the energy shock in Germany after Putin invaded Ukraine. The solution now is the same: buy ourselves out of the fossil fuels trap
Yes, there are big differences between the war of aggression that Russia has now been waging against Ukraine for four years and the war the US and Israel launched against Iran. The biggest difference: the US is still a democracy. Even a president who considers himself all-powerful is not. From scathing press coverage to anger over high oil prices, fear of the midterm elections and – the capitalist form of democracy – falling stock prices, what people think makes a difference. That is why the US president is occasionally forced to change his mind. That is not the case in Russia.
Vladimir Putin had a clear plan: Russia wanted to occupy the whole of Ukraine and turn it into a satellite state or annex its territory. Putin was preparing for this war for years, in my view; this included a cheap energy trap into which he successfully lured Germany through the construction of Nord Stream 2 and the purchase of gas storage facilities and refineries by Gazprom and Rosneft.
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03/24/2026 - 11:18
Advocates say Lee Zeldin’s EPA has rolled back protections and cut staff and funding, putting health at risk
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More than 160 environmental and public health organizations on Tuesday called for Lee Zeldin, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator, to resign or be fired.
“No [EPA] administrator in history – Democratic or Republican – has so brazenly betrayed the agency’s core mission,” the groups wrote in an open letter. “EPA’s foremost purpose is to protect human health and the environment. With Administrator Lee Zeldin at the helm, EPA has abandoned its mission, creating damage that will take decades to address.”
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