The head of ExxonMobil told to “eat shit” as he was about to receive an award. A US senator and coal boss called a “sick fuck”, almost sparking a brawl. Theatre shows interrupted. As the climate crisis has deepened, protests aimed at those deemed responsible are becoming starkly personal, and often confrontational.

At the vanguard of this new style of in-your-face activism is Climate Defiance, a group of just a handful of core staffers now marking its first birthday following a year of disrupting, often crudely, the usually mundane procession of talks, speeches and panels that feature Joe Biden administration officials, oil company bosses and financiers.

“They are seen as the hot climate group right now, which is amazing given how small they are,” said Dana Fisher, a sociologist and author who is an expert in climate activism at American University. “They are obnoxious, but they are having some success in being outrageous enough to get attention, and in an election year that is important. They are certainly pushing the Biden administration.”

Climate Defiance’s tactics are usually clandestine, signing up to or slipping into events before storming the stage and denouncing their targets, who are often referred to as “monsters” or “fiends”, in a sort of public shaming spread via social media.

But as the group’s influence has grown, having been granted a meeting they requested at the White House to share their calls for stronger action on global heating, so has the scale of their ambitions. Climate Defiance is organizing a mass protest involving hundreds of people aimed at shutting down the congressional baseball game, a longstanding bipartisan tradition in Washington, this summer, calling on “every good person to join us”.

“It’s really going to trigger a nerve,” said Michael Greenberg, the 30-year-old founder of Climate Defiance. “People love the tradition of the baseball game, because it’s bipartisan, and we’re going to say, ‘No, we’re shutting it down.’ We really need to shake people awake and make climate a top three issue for this election.”

Greenberg is disparaging of what he sees as the placid, desk-bound conformity of mainstream climate groups, as well as the litany of events that feature those he considers responsible for the climate crisis. “They’re literally risking billions of lives and they’re getting honored at galas,” he said of his targets.

The confrontations themselves are very much fashioned for an era of TikTok and Instagram, where a new visual edge needs to be found each time. “Another soup toss at a painting isn’t going to get attention now, and so cursing is something new they are doing,” said Fisher. “It’s designed to be provocative, but is very performative. It’s designed for younger people who are scrolling through videos.”

Sometimes the swearing is in visual form – Darren Woods, the chief executive of Exxon, stood haplessly alongside a banner reading “eat shit, Darren” as he was denounced as a “climate criminal” by protesters – while sometimes it is uttered by target and activist. “Just close the fucking door,” muttered Jerome Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, as his speech in December was interrupted by activists who stormed the stage, causing him to flee.

Occasionally the confrontations can provoke flashes of anger, like recently when a Climate Defiance volunteer accosted Joe Manchin, the conservative Democratic senator and coal baron, and called him a “sick fuck”, causing the incensed West Virginia lawmaker to square up to the protester, who was then pushed away by an aide.

Such interactions will not persuade people such as Manchin to suddenly oppose fossil fuels and may even dismay casual viewers of the video, Greenberg admits, but the founder insists such stunts help push climate up the agenda with an easily distracted public.

“For your average suburban soccer mom, they probably don’t love it, but a lot of our supporters were excited to see it,” Greenberg said of the repeated tangles with Manchin. “I guess there’s a tension in some of these actions. The stuff that gets the most attention is often the stuff that’s a little bit less popular. So yeah, I consider it a trade-off.”

He added: “What we’re aiming to do is much more ambitious than just get some anger off of our chest. We’re really trying to make climate change a top-tier issue in the American political system. Otherwise, it’ll just get ignored.”

For these efforts, Climate Defiance is increasingly feted by political figures and donors. Fundraising parties have been held by the likes of Abigail Disney, the heiress and climate campaigner, and attended by appreciative progressive Democrats. “You have gotten the country’s attention,” Ro Khanna, a Democratic congressman from California, told one of the fundraisers. “People in Congress are talking about you. Senators are talking about you. The president is talking about you. And remember this, the future is with you.”

Even John Podesta, Biden’s top climate envoy, who has had several events interrupted by Climate Defiance, has engaged with the group, agreeing to meet them at the White House for talks last year. Podesta called the group a “pain in the ass” and complained that it did not protest against enough Republicans, Greenberg said. Podesta was contacted about the comments.

But will any of this make a difference? Being hounded by climate activists may have helped nudge the Biden administration to pause new gas exports, but the influence is more opaque when it comes to the broader American public, who are increasingly worried about the ravages of heatwaves, wildfires and flooding but still mostly consider the climate crisis as a background issue when it comes to voting.

“We know historically that radical action can inspire other people to join more moderate components of the movement, but most research on this was done before social media,” said Fisher. “We don’t know how well videos saying ‘eat shit’ will work out yet. It’s frustrating.”

‘Ecocidal pyromaniac’

The protests may even backfire with some voters who consider them to be counter-productive or even violent, as evidenced in some of the negative reactions to a brawl that erupted last week after Climate Defiance activists rushed a stage where Lisa Murkowski, a Republican senator, was speaking. Murkowski is a “murderer” and an “ecocidal pyromaniac”, according to the group, which in its confrontations connects politicians who have supported fossil fuel interests to the harms of the climate crisis.

For now, the currency of success is measured in video views and in how normalized protest interruptions are becoming from a range groups, such as Sunrise or Extinction Rebellion, who have shouted down speeches by Donald Trump or halted performances at the opera or theater to decry the lack of action on the climate crisis.

“Climate Defiance changed the format,” said Nate Smith, a climate activist and theater producer who stood up to interrupt a press preview of An Enemy of the People, the Henrik Ibsen play currently showing on Broadway, in a protest by Extinction Rebellion NY.

“I’ve been in front of unmarked security forces with machine guns and felt way more calm than interrupting my own love, my own business, but there is no Broadway on a dead planet,” said Smith about the action. Smith’s warning about sea-level rise during the show was responded to in character by Jeremy Strong, the Succession actor who plays the protagonist in the production.

Strong, ironically, is on the board of the Climate Emergency Fund, which funds groups such as Climate Defiance. “Listen, I didn’t want it to happen, you know, on my stage but at the same time … I’d feel like a hypocrite if I didn’t, in a way, support what they were saying,” Strong has said.

Acting in an unperturbed way has now become a required skill for politicians and others who risk interruption. At a boosterish breakfast meeting in Manhattan last week, Eric Adams, the mayor of New York, was delivering a self-laudatory speech to several hundred supporters when a group of young people involved in Planet Over Profit, another activist group, clambered on stage to shout “Landlord Adams, burning NYC” and unfurled a banner, before being bundled away. Four arrests were made outside.

Adams plowed on with his speech throughout the intervention, remarking afterwards that the protesters were trying to “hijack the narrative” and that they “mean nothing to me”. If this new era of confrontation becomes commonplace to the point of being ignored, what tactics will climate activists come up with next?

The climate crisis won’t wait to find out. The last 10 months have, globally, smashed all previous temperature records and, just in the past week, new studies have come out showing that the planet’s coral reefs are facing their most serious risk of heat death yet, while the world’s economy is set to lose 19% of its income in the next 26 years, an eye-watering $38tn, because of the impacts of climate change.

“These activists are going to annoy some people, but scientists are screaming at the top of their lungs about the climate crisis, and no one is listening,” said Fisher.

“Not everyone will like it but a range of tactics is necessary right now. The destruction we are seeing is far worse than calling Joe Manchin a nasty name.”

The rollout of batteries across the global electricity industry more than doubled last year but will need to be six times faster if the world hopes to meet its renewable energy targets, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).

A report from the global energy watchdog found that new batteries totalling 42 gigawatts (GW) were plugged into electricity systems around the world last year, increasing total capacity by more than 130% from the year before to 85GW.

However, the IEA warned that an estimated 1,500GW of energy storage would be required worldwide by the end of the decade, including 1,200 GW from batteries, to avoid stalling the global clean energy transition and help meet the UN’s net zero targets.

Batteries have emerged as one of the world’s fastest-growing clean energy technologies after a 90% decline in costs over the past 15 years driven by the rapid growth of electric vehicles.

But costs will need to fall further, according to the IEA, and governments must do more to diversify the supply chains behind battery manufacturing to avoid bottlenecks in the market.

In return, a battery boom could offer a “master key” able to unlock much bigger transformations in the uptake of renewable energy, reduction of fossil fuels from power grids and in accelerating the introduction of electric vehicles, according to the IEA executive director, Fatih Birol.

“Batteries are changing the game before our eyes.” he said.

The IEA found that global investment in batteries reached $150bn last year after an eightfold increase in car battery investments and a fivefold increase for power grid battery storage. About $115bn was invested in vehicle batteries, of which 90% was in China, Europe and the US, according to the report.

The global battery boom has enabled electric car sales to surge from 3m in 2020 to almost 14m last year, with further strong growth expected in the coming years, according to the report. Batteries are predicted to play a far bigger role in global power grids to help cut fossil fuels from electricity generation.

“The combination of solar PV and batteries is today competitive with new coal plants in India. And just in the next few years, it will be cheaper than new coal in China and gas-fired power in the United States,” Birol said.

“The electricity and transport sectors are two key pillars for bringing down emissions quickly enough to meet the targets agreed at Cop28 and keep open the possibility of limiting global warming to 1.5C above preindustrial levels. Batteries will provide the foundations in both areas, playing an invaluable role in scaling up renewables and electrifying transport while delivering secure and sustainable energy for businesses and households.”

Electric vehicles are routinely being written off after minor accidents, as a shortage of skilled mechanics and parts, as well as outdated laws, leads Australian insurers to scrap EVs prematurely instead of repairing them.

Despite the scarcity of supply that has plagued the local market in recent years, in part due to the lack of a fuel-efficiency standard, the financial reality of insuring EVs is continuing to consign them to scrap yards while inflating premiums for owners.

Multiple factors – mostly related to complications to do with the vehicles’ batteries – are leading insurers to more readily scrap EVs compared with a conventional petrol version suffering the same damage in a collision.

The relative infancy of Australia’s EV repairing capability is one key factor, according to Matt Hobbs, CEO of the Motor Trades Association of Australia (MTAA).

“When you look at the need to upskill the industry, we’ve got a problem and we’ve had one for a while,” Hobbs said.

Even minor repairs require a mechanic who has undertaken autoelectrician training to work on a battery or its case.

“It’s not necessarily obvious on any car what the damage is underneath,” Hobbs said. “Now when you’ve got a 400 volt battery and you’re looking under a panel … you need to depower the battery, remove it, then re-energise it … to safely work an EV.”

Hobbs said it cost between $5,000-$7,000 to upskill a mechanic to repair electric vehicles in Australia. The MTAA is hoping for changes to the government’s new energy apprenticeship program, including easing requirements, to ensure the skills deficit is addressed.

Roughly one in 10 repairers in Australia are certified to service EVs, according to data from the Australian Automotive Service and Repair Authority.

In the United Kingdom, where a similar proportion of mechanics are qualified to work on EVs, seemingly simple crashes are causing complete write-offs, Bloomberg reported one insurer saying last week.

The Insurance Council of Australia (ICA) acknowledged insurers were forced to make similar decisions locally.

The shortage of mechanics not only balloons wait times, but in some instances EVs have to be transported long distances to the closest repair facility, adding costs, the ICA said.

Additionally, there is a shortage of locally held spare parts, particularly for vehicles and brands that are newer to the market, which prolongs repair times. Local laws also make it illegal to repair EVs in various conditions.

An insurance industry source said insurers had seen cases of scratched battery packs where the cells inside were likely undamaged. But the vehicle would still need to be written off if it could not be seen by a trained mechanic who could access the diagnostic data.

Behyad Jafari, the Electric Vehicle Council chief executive, said that up until recently, laws governing vehicle repair in some states were even more severe.

“In early regulations, almost any crash would result in an electric car being written off due to the issue of the battery,” he said.

He said EV industry groups and insurers had worked with regulators in recent years to broaden the scope of when an EV can be repaired.

The Electric Vehicle Council says the laws are too prescriptive and it believes mechanics and insurers should have more scope to repair in more circumstances.

An ICA spokesperson said the group was also calling for the “reform of laws governing written off vehicles to enable more vehicles to be safely repaired instead of scrapped, including EVs”.

The ICA said insurance premiums for electric vehicles were being inflated due to complications around batteries and repairs, as well as the fact that EVs generally cost more to buy.

But the EV industry remains frustrated by those increased premiums because, in general, EVs that are not involved in a crash are likely to require considerably less servicing over its lifetime.

Danny Martin, an industry analyst at IBISWorld, said EVs cost on average 18% more to insure than an internal combustion engine counterpart.

“Sometimes damage to electric vehicle batteries can be almost prohibitively complex and in some cases it’s too expensive to fix – they might need to scrap the car from a financial perspective,” Martin said.

Steven Du, the NSW representative for the Tesla Owners Club of Australia and NSW vice-chair of the Australian Electric Vehicle Association, said the wait for repairs was improving.

“A few years ago, a repair after a crash was taking a couple of months, but now they can be quite speedy,” he said, acknowledging the experience can be faster for Teslas given their market share and availability of parts.

He said EV owners were acutely aware of premature write-offs and the need for upskilling mechanics to improve repairs and bring down premiums.

“If we do nothing about it we’ll remain with crippled cars,” Du said.

Labour has pledged to halt the decline of British species and protect at least 30% of the land and sea by 2030 if it is elected.

Steve Reed, the shadow environment secretary, also vowed to set a new land use framework that would prioritise the protection of nature, and to deliver on targets to improve the UK’s environment.

“Nature is under threat in Britain,” Reed said. “The Conservatives have left it one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world. Almost half of our bird species and a quarter of our mammal species are at risk of extinction. Precious landscapes in our national parks are in decline. And our rivers, lakes and seas are awash with record levels of toxic sewage.”

The commitments mark the first time the Labour leadership has explicitly agreed to uphold the nature and biodiversity targets. It is the party’s first major intervention on nature issues as the UK prepares for a general election this year in which environmental concerns – sewage in rivers, air pollution and the net zero target – will play a leading role.

Reed said the protection of the natural environment was a top priority for Keir Starmer, the Labour leader. Nature would be essential in meeting Starmer’s mission on the economy, health, education, crime and energy. Improving access to nature and air and water quality would improve health, help to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions, and lift the quality of life for millions of people, Reed said.

The Conservatives have been criticised for setting ambitious environmental goals without putting in place the policies and regulations required to meet them. Instead, many regulations have in effect gone unenforced as government bodies, including the Environment Agency and Natural England, have had their budgets reduced and had to cut staff.

The Office for Environmental Protection, the public watchdog, has found that the government is off track on its nature targets.

Reed said this was endangering the UK’s natural environment for future generations. “Parents worry their children and grandchildren may never experience the beauty of the natural world as every previous generation has,” he said.

Upholding the targets of halting biodiversity decline and protecting 30% of the UK’s land and seas by 2030 will mean almost all of this taking place in Labour’s first term of government, as the next parliament is likely to run from this year or early next year until 2029.

That will be a massive task given that the targets are currently off track and the shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, is reluctant to make any new spending commitments. A potential commitment of £28bn to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and kickstart a green economy was watered down earlier this year.

Reed is understood to believe the targets can be reached if the government works in partnership with civil society organisations and business.

He said a Labour government would seek to reduce flood damage by increasing natural defences, such as trees and wetlands, as well as building up carbon sinks in peatlands. Stopping illegal sewage dumping and attracting new investment into water companies would help clean up the landscape, and better public transport would improve air quality, he said.

Nature campaigners welcomed the pledges but called for more detail on how they would be implemented.

Craig Bennett, the chief executive of the Wildlife Trusts, said Labour was right to recognise that prioritising nature was “political gold dust” as these were areas of huge public concern, and he predicted that the stark difference in approach to these issues compared with that of the Conservatives would resonate with the public.

“The Conservatives have pretended nature is opposed to farming, which is just stoking a culture war,” he said. “Reed is talking about working in partnership with nature organisations. This is a complete contrast in substance and in tone.”

However, he said Reed should go further and set out a fully fledged “nature manifesto” before the election, which Reed had indicated he would do.

Mark Spencer, the farming minister, said: “Labour’s eco schemes in Wales have already cost more than 5,000 jobs and would close more than 20,000 farms if rolled out across England. This shows Keir Starmer has no plan for supporting our rural economy and protecting our natural heritage. A Labour government would take the countryside back to square one.”

A spokesperson for the NFU said: “Our ask of the next government is that any proposals to boost nature recovery simply sit alongside equally ambitious plans for food production. This should really matter to everyone to protect and enhance the UK’s food security. We can and must do more, supported by the right policy framework that values both quality, sustainable food and the environment in which it is produced.”

Richard Benwell, the chief executive of Wildlife and Countryside Link, said: “There’s a test of real ambition from Labour to halt the decline of nature, and a clear recognition that even the most enterprising missions for growth and prosperity would be meaningless if the natural riches that support us continue to be squandered.

“Starmer will need bold policies to meet public demand for nature recovery. Now we have the statement of ambition – next, the public deserve to know how Labour would deliver.”

Noise pollution from traffic stunts growth in baby birds, even while inside the egg, research has found.

Unhatched birds and hatchlings that are exposed to noise from city traffic experience long-term negative effects on their health, growth and reproduction, the study found.

“Sound has a much stronger and more direct impact on bird development than we knew before,” said Dr Mylene Mariette, a bird communication expert at Deakin University in Australia and a co-author of the study, published in the journal Science. “It would be wise to work more to reduce noise pollution.”

A growing body of research has suggested that noise pollution causes stress to birds and makes communication harder for them. But whether birds are already distressed at a young age because they are affected by noise, or by how noise disrupts their environment and parental care, was still unclear.

Mariette’s team routinely exposed zebra finch eggs for five days to either silence, soothing playbacks of zebra finch songs, or recordings of city traffic noises such as revving motors and cars driving past. They did the same with newborn chicks for about four hours a night for up to 13 nights, without exposing the birds’ parents to the sounds.

They noticed that the bird eggs were almost 20% less likely to hatch if exposed to traffic noise. The chicks that did hatch were more than 10% smaller and almost 15% lighter than the other hatchlings. When the team ran analyses on their red blood cells and their telomeres – a piece of DNA that shortens with stress and age – they were more eroded and shorter than their counterparts’.

The effects continued even after the chicks were no longer exposed to noise pollution, and carried over into their reproductive age four years later. The birds disturbed by noise during the early stages of their lives produced fewer than half as many offspring as their counterparts.

“We were expecting some effects, but we didn’t expect them to be so strong,” said Mariette, especially because the exposure to noise pollution was relatively mild and for only four hours a day. “It was really quite striking.”

“We generally assume, based on numerous studies, that very young birds, especially in the egg, have very poor or no sensitivity to sound,” said Robert Dooling, an animal hearing expert from the University of Maryland in the US, who was not involved in the study. But “this study raises the spectre of broad, negative, enduring effects of noise on development”.

Hans Slabbekoorn, a professor of acoustic ecology and behaviour at Leiden University in the Netherlands who was not involved in the study, said he was particularly surprised. When his team ran experiments exposing chicks and their parents to moderate noise pollution, they did not find any impact on the growth of the chicks.

Slabbekoorn speculated that changes in the behaviour of the parents – such as how they attended to their nests more – may have avoided or compensated for the negative effects of noise on the chicks.

“I was indeed not expecting [such a] big impact necessarily,” Slabbekoorn said. It is the cumulative nature of these negative effects that may “in the end be most problematic”, he added. “Especially when noisy conditions are indeed frequent or continuous, as with birds living in noisy neighbourhoods, close to airports, or busy highways.”

His research has also found that birds at airports are exposed to such loud noise levels that they may be partially deaf.

More data is needed to pinpoint how many birds and which species these levels apply to, and it remains unclear whether it is the loudness, the pattern, the pitch, or other elements of traffic noise that disturb the young birds, or the mechanism behind the observed effects.

The number of fossil fuel and petrochemical industry lobbyists has increased by more than a third at UN talks to agree the first global treaty to cut plastic pollution, analysis shows.

Most plastic is made from fossil fuels via a chemical process known as cracking, and 196 lobbyists from both industries are at the UN talks in Ottawa, Canada, where countries are attempting to come to an agreement to curb plastic production as part of a treaty to cut global plastic waste, according to analysis by the Center for International Environmental Law (Ciel).

The 196 lobbyists registered for the talks represent a 37% increase from the 143 lobbyists registered at the last talks, in Nairobi. This in turn was a 36% increase on the previous year’s number. Increased plastic production is a major part of the fossil fuel industry’s plans for the future, and any attempts to curb production, such as those being discussed at the UN talks, are an obvious threat to their profits.

According to Carbon Tracker, BP expects plastics to represent 95% of net growth in oil demand from 2020 to 2040, and the International Energy Agency estimates plastic demand will make up 45% of growth for oil and gas mining to 2040.

Fossil fuel and chemical industry lobbyists are also gaining greater access to sessions with member states to push their agenda, according to Ciel.

They outnumber the delegates from the European Union, and there are three times more fossil fuel and chemical industry lobbyists than independent scientists from the Scientists’ Coalition for an Effective Plastic Treaty.

“The outcome of these talks is of critical importance to countries and communities around the world, and it is vital to expose and confront the role of corporations whose agendas are fundamentally in conflict with the global public interest. Access to the negotiations is just one piece of the puzzle,” said Delphine Lévi Alvarès, global petrochemicals campaign coordinator at Ciel.

“Some may argue that everyone enjoys equal access, but that is simply not true. Lobbyists are appearing on country delegations and are gaining privileged access to member-state-only sessions, where sensitive discussions unfold behind closed doors,” Lévi Alvarès said. “Beyond the troubling number of lobbyists present at the negotiation talks, behind-the-scenes industry lobbying activities and events take place around the world in the months leading up to negotiations.”

The communities most affected by plastic pollution, including Pacific small island states, are at the talks in far fewer numbers and do not have the same access to meetings with member states, Ciel said.

Tori Cress, communications manager at the environmental group Keepers of the Water, which is part of the Indigenous Peoples’ Caucus at the talks, said: “Industry lobbyists are enjoying seats on state delegations while the communities most impacted by the plastic crisis struggle to have their voices heard.

“While we are surrounded by industry-sponsored pro-plastics ads, Indigenous peoples’ representatives experience lack of access, are given extremely limited time to speak, and lack recognition even at the First Nations table. Plastics have poisoned our water and what happens to the water happens to people.”

Discussions at the UN treaty talks in Ottawa are attempting to break the deadlock between fossil fuel nations and others pushing for an ambitious treaty to deal with the whole lifecycle of plastic.

Luis Vayas Valdivieso, the Ecuadorian ambassador to the UK and the chair of the UN intergovernmental negotiations for a legally binding instrument on plastic pollution, said he was confident that negotiations would continue to bring about a global treaty for signing next year.

Graham Forbes, Greenpeace’s head of delegation at the talks, said: “The influence and growing presence of fossil fuel and petrochemical industries are not what the people want, nor what the climate needs. The fossil fuel lobby is holding us back from negotiating a treaty that will end the plastics crisis. The UN member states must step up and deliver a global plastics treaty that will cut plastic production and end single-use plastic.”

Coal-fired power plants would be forced to capture smokestack emissions or shut down under a rule issued on Thursday by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

New limits on greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel-fired electric plants are the Biden administration’s most ambitious effort yet to roll back planet-warming pollution from the power sector, the nation’s second-largest contributor to the climate crisis. The rules are a key part of Joe Biden’s pledge to eliminate carbon pollution from the electricity sector by 2035 and economy-wide by 2050.

The rule was among four separate measures targeting coal and natural gas plants that the EPA said would provide “regular certainty” to the power industry and encourage them to make investments to transition “to a clean energy economy”. They also include requirements to reduce toxic wastewater pollutants from coal-fired plants and to safely manage so-called coal ash in unlined storage ponds.

The new rules “reduce pollution from fossil fuel-fired power plants, protect communities from pollution and improve public health – all while supporting the long-term, reliable supply of the electricity needed to power America forward”, the EPA administrator, Michael Regan, told reporters at a White House briefing.

The plan is likely to be challenged by industry groups and Republican-leaning states. They have repeatedly accused the Democratic administration of overreach on environmental regulations and have warned of a looming reliability crisis for the electric grid. The rules issued on Thursday are among at least a half-dozen EPA regulations limiting power plant emissions and wastewater pollution.

Environmental groups hailed the EPA’s latest action as urgently needed to protect against the devastating harms of the climate crisis.

The power plant rule marks the first time the federal government has restricted carbon dioxide emissions from existing coal-fired power plants. The rule also would force future electric plants fueled by coal or gas to control up to 90% of their carbon pollution. The new standards will stave off 1.38bn metric tons of carbon pollution through 2047, equivalent to the annual emissions of 328m gas cars, the EPA said, and will provide hundreds of billions of dollars in climate and health benefits, measured in fewer premature deaths, asthma cases, and lost work or school days.

Coal plants that plan to stay open beyond 2039 would have to cut or capture 90% of their carbon dioxide emissions by 2032, the EPA said. Plants that expect to retire by 2039 would face a less stringent standard but still would have to capture some emissions. Coal plants that are set to retire by 2032 would not be subject to the new rules.

Rich Nolan, president and CEO of the National Mining Association, said that through the latest rules, “the EPA is systematically dismantling the reliability of the US electric grid”.

He accused Biden, Regan and other officials of “ignoring our energy reality and forcing the closure of well-operating coal plants that repeatedly come to the rescue during times of peak demand. The repercussions of this reckless plan will be felt across the country by all Americans.”

Regan denied that the rules were aimed at shutting down the coal sector, but acknowledged in proposing the power plant rule last year that “we will see some coal retirements”.

The proposal relies on technologies to limit carbon pollution that the industry itself has said are viable and available, Regan said. “Multiple power companies have indicated that [carbon capture and storage] is a viable technology for the power sector today, and they are currently pursuing those CCS projects,” he told reporters on Wednesday.

Coal provided about 16% of US electricity last year, down from about 45% in 2010. Natural gas provides about 43% of US electricity, with the remainder from nuclear energy and renewables such as wind, solar and hydropower.

The power plant rule “completes a historic grand slam” of major actions by the Biden administration to reduce carbon pollution, said David Doniger, a climate and clean energy expert at the Natural Resources Defense Council. The first and most important action was passage of the 2022 climate law, officially known as the Inflation Reduction Act, he said, followed by separate EPA rules targeting tailpipe emissions from cars and trucks and methane emissions from oil and gas drilling.

A UK deposit return scheme for recycling drinks bottles has been delayed to 2027, meaning it will not be in place until almost a decade after it was proposed.

Campaigners say the delay is a “huge disappointment”, adding they are doubly dismayed that the plan will not include glass bottles.

The environment minister Robbie Moore told parliament on Wednesday that the scheme would not include glass because glass recycling would “create undue complexity for the drinks industry and it increases storage and handling costs for retailers”. Large drinks companies have been lobbying the government to remove glass from the scheme across the UK.

He said the delay was because additional time was needed to synchronise the policy of the devolved administrations in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales with that in England. Scotland has agreed to remove glass from its scheme after being asked to by the UK government, but Wales is still including it.

Moore said: “We will continue our conversations with the Welsh government, but if their position does not change, we will reiterate the duty to protect the UK internal market and facilitate free trade within the UK so businesses can continue trading unhindered across the UK and ensure better prices and choice for consumers.”

UK consumers use an estimated 13bn plastic drinks bottles a year. Only 7.5bn are recycled, with the remaining 5.5bn sent to landfill, littered or incinerated. The scheme is intended to cut litter on land and sea by paying consumers a small cash sum to return their bottles and cans. Once returned, retailers are responsible for properly recycling the containers. Deposit return schemes have increased recycling rates to more than 90% in other countries.

Sandy Luk, the chief executive of the Marine Conservation Society, said: “It’s a huge disappointment that the new scheme isn’t going to start for another three years and isn’t going to cover glass bottles. For our ocean’s sake, we can’t keep kicking the can – or bottle – down the road. We call on the UK government to speed up this law and to follow Wales’s ambition to include plastic, metal and glass.”

The charity Keep Britain Tidy estimates 25bn bottles and cans will be littered between now and the start of the scheme. Allison Ogden-Newton, the head of the charity, said: “This delay means oceans of bottles and cans will continue to needlessly pile up in bins and continue to be strewn on roadsides and in our green spaces, rather than being recycled.

“The exclusion of glass is hugely disappointing. Glass containers start fires and cause harm to people, pets and wildlife. This is why 78% of people want to see it included in a deposit return scheme. We are pleased that Wales look determined to pursue their best-in-class scheme, and encourage the rest of the UK to follow suit.”

Steve Reed, the shadow environment secretary, said: “We’ve gone through four prime ministers since the Conservative government first promised a deposit return scheme for recycling bottles. And yet it will be nearly a decade until they have something to show for it. The Conservatives simply don’t care that plastic bottles end up littering our streets, parks, rivers and seas. Labour will work across Britain and with business to bring in a deposit return scheme that will stop this waste and clean up our environment.”

As someone who actively campaigns for environmental protection, I admire George Monbiot, but his attack on the excellent film Six Inches of Soil seems to suggest that he is prepared to assault any idea that does not conform to his apparently very limited worldview (There’s no such thing as a benign beef farm – so beware the ‘eco-friendly’ new film straight out of a storybook, 15 April).

First, the film is primarily about how we can improve and protect our soils, which for many years have been degraded by the overuse of agrochemicals and overproduction. Regenerative farming aims to improve soil quality, increase biodiversity and allow farmers to grow food for us while making a profit. I would have thought these are aims that Monbiot would heartily endorse. Instead he focuses on the beef farmer in the film and his contribution to the climate crisis.

Second, yes, cattle farming is a major contributor to greenhouse gases, but the real villains are the big food lots in the US, Brazil and elsewhere. The regenerative farmer keeps beef and dairy cattle as part of the farm’s ecosystem, using the manure to fertilise fields that would otherwise be covered in artificial fertiliser, much of it produced by fossil fuels. The keeping of animals on a small scale encourages greater biodiversity, improves animal welfare and produces high-quality beef or milk. In the long term, regenerative farmers are encouraging less frequent consumption of meat of a higher quality, which has to be better for us and the environment.

It is naive to expect farmers to completely rewild their land – they need to make money and we need food. Rather than attack those who are trying to improve their farming methods, let us celebrate the regenerative farmers who are making real improvements to the ways in which we produce food and look after our countryside.
Rev Richard Stainer
World development adviser, diocese of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich, Suffolk

Mosquito-borne diseases are spreading across the globe, and particularly in Europe, due to climate breakdown, an expert has said.

The insects spread illnesses such as malaria and dengue fever, the prevalences of which have hugely increased over the past 80 years as global heating has given them the warmer, more humid conditions they thrive in.

Prof Rachel Lowe who leads the global health resilience group at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center in Spain, has warned that mosquito-borne disease outbreaks are set to spread across currently unaffected parts of northern Europe, Asia, North America and Australia over the next few decades.

She is due to give a presentation at the global congress of the European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases in Barcelona to warn that the world must be prepared for a sharp uptick in these diseases.

“Global warming due to climate change means that the disease vectors that carry and spread malaria and dengue [fever] can find a home in more regions, with outbreaks occurring in areas where people are likely to be immunologically naive and public health systems unprepared,” Lowe said.

“The stark reality is that longer hot seasons will enlarge the seasonal window for the spread of mosquito-borne diseases and favour increasingly frequent outbreaks that are increasingly complex to deal with.”

Dengue used to be primarily found in tropical and subtropical regions, as freezing overnight temperatures kill the insect’s larvae and eggs. Longer hot seasons and less frequent frosts have meant it has become the fastest-spreading mosquito-borne viral disease in the world, and it is taking hold in Europe.

The Asian tiger mosquito (Aedes albopictus), carries dengue fever and has become established in 13 European countries as of 2023: Italy, France, Spain, Malta, Monaco, San Marino, Gibraltar, Liechtenstein, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Greece and Portugal.

The insect is thriving; nine out of the 10 most hospitable years for transmission of the disease have occurred since 2000, and the number of dengue cases reported to the WHO has increased eightfold in the past two decades, from 500,000 in 2000 to more than 5m in 2019.

Lowe said climate breakdown would turbocharge this spread as droughts followed floods: “Droughts and floods linked to climate change can lead to greater transmission of the virus, with stored water providing additional mosquito breeding sites.

“Lessons from previous outbreaks underscore the importance of assessing future vector-borne disease risks and preparing contingencies for future outbreaks.”

She said that if the current trajectory of high carbon emissions and population growth continued, the number of people living in areas with mosquito-borne diseases would double to 4.7 billion by the end of the century.

Lowe added: “With climate change seeming so difficult to address, we can expect to see more cases and possibly deaths from diseases such as dengue and malaria across mainland Europe. We must anticipate outbreaks and move to intervene early to prevent diseases from happening in the first place.

“Efforts need to focus on enhancing surveillance with early warning and response systems similar to those seen in other parts of the world, to more effectively target finite resources to the most at-risk areas to control and prevent disease outbreaks and save lives.”

Climate breakdown is also amplifying the threat from antimicrobial resistance, a separate presentation at the conference will warn.

Prof Sabiha Essack, the head of the antimicrobial resistance unit at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, said climate breakdown was a “threat multiplier” for antimicrobial resistance: “Climate change compromises the ecological and environmental integrity of living systems and enables pathogens to increasingly cause disease. The impact on water systems, food-producing animals and crops threatens global food supply.

“Human activities associated with population growth and transport, together with climate change, increase antibiotic resistance and the spread of waterborne and vector-borne diseases of humans, animals and plants.”