Liberal senator Bridget McKenzie has again left the door open for a Coalition government to level a road user charge against owners of electric vehicles, indicating concern about decreasing fuel excise and the impact on budgets for road repairs.

But the shadow transport minister also said the Coalition wouldn’t follow the US in banning Chinese-made EVs, which put her at odds with comments on Sunday from Nationals colleague, Barnaby Joyce. He invoked last week’s Hezbollah members’ pager explosions in raising his concern about technology he claimed could be made with a “malevolent purpose” by a “totalitarian state”.

McKenzie told the ABC’s Insiders on Sunday she was developing the Coalition’s transport policy ahead of the next election, which would outline the opposition’s plans for electric vehicles.

Asked if that policy would include a road user charge for electric vehicle owners – a widely suggested option to replace fuel excise due to EVs not requiring petrol – McKenzie didn’t rule it out, but said the current government should already be acting on the issue.

“This is one of the great privileges of holding the Treasury benches. You get to solve wicked problems such as this,” she said.

“The high court has ruled on the need for the treasurer to get going on a national way to actually tax EV users in terms of their use of roads, because right now, it is only petrol excise that is actually funding those roads and they [the government] are again doing nothing.”

The government has come under pressure from motoring groups to address the declining fuel excise take, as EVs take-up rises.

From January to August, 7.6% of total car sales were EVs, according to the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries and the Electric Vehicle Council, while hybrid vehicles sales, including plug-ins, made up 15.5%.

McKenzie has spoken often about the policy challenges of road user charges, in 2023 telling Guardian Australia the government shouldn’t rule out road user charging “when it is tied to fuel excise and fuel efficiency standards – there needs to be one policy discussion rather than a fragmented one”.

In a speech last year, she also said “equity in contributing taxes to fund road maintenance is a key principle” of Coalition thinking on the issue.

The Biden administration last week proposed new rules that would in effect prohibit Chinese-made vehicles from US roads after concerns about software and digital connections that could be used to spy on Americans or sabotage vehicles. The Australian energy minister, Chris Bowen, said Australia would not follow suit.

McKenzie, asked about whether Australia should ban Chinese-made EVs, answered: “It is not the Coalition’s plan. We won’t be banning EVs.”

Those comments put her at odds with Joyce, the shadow veterans affairs minister, who earlier on Sunday had criticised Bowen for not replicating the US move.

Joyce, in a Sky News interview, joked that Bowen had “boldly stated that he knows more about issues pertinent to electric vehicles than the United States of America does”, accusing the minister of “catastrophic decisions” previously.

The former deputy prime minister went on to appear to draw a link between Chinese-made EVs and the pager attack on Hezbollah members which killed dozens in Lebanon last week.

A senior Lebanese security source and another source told Reuters that the Mossad, Israel’s spy agency planted a small amount of explosives inside 5,000 Taiwan-made pagers ordered by Hezbollah months before Tuesday’s detonations. At least 32 people were killed and thousands wounded, according to Lebanon’s health ministry.

“After the pager issue, the pagers basically blowing up around terrorists in southern Lebanon, the penny dropped for so many people that there is a capacity remotely to create massive pain, massive hurt, maybe at the least to create a complete breakdown and chaos,” Joyce said on Sky.

“People have got to start asking the questions like ‘if you can update the software, if you can track these vehicles, if they’re made in China, if there was a malevolent purpose behind it from a totalitarian state, what might be the consequences of that?’”

Joyce also raised concern about “200,000 Chinese-made solar heaters sitting on roofs” nationwide.

In an Sky News interview taped on Saturday, the foreign affairs minister, Penny Wong, said Hezbollah “is a terrorist organisation and we understand the security position Israel is in.”

But she stressed the “cycle of violence” and “continued escalation” will not bring peace, citing Australia, the US and the UK’s calls for a ceasefire in Lebanon.

Wong repeated government warnings for Australians in Lebanon to leave “by whatever means are available while Beirut airport is still open.”

“We are concerned about regional escalation,” she said.

Pope Francis has been sharply criticised by one of Belgium’s Catholic universities over his stance on the role of women in society, in a strongly worded press release issued just moments after the pontiff spoke at the college.

Professors and students at UCLouvain, where the 87-year-old pontiff had made a speech on Saturday afternoon, said they wanted to express their “incomprehension and disapproval” about the pope’s views.

“UCLouvain deplores the conservative positions expressed by Pope Francis on the role of women in society,” said the statement, in extraordinary language from a Catholic university about a pope.

Francis went to the university on Saturday to celebrate its upcoming 600th anniversary as part of a weekend trip he is making to Belgium. His speech largely called for global action on climate change, but he also responded to a letter to him from students and professors that had asked about the Catholic church’s teaching on women.

In the letter, which was read out loud to him, the students questioned him on the Church’s historical part in entrenching female subservience, the unfair division of labour and even disproportionate female poverty.

“Throughout the history of the Church, women have been made invisible,” the letter read. “What place, then, for women in the Church?”

Francis replied by saying the Church was female, noting that the Italian word for it, “chiesa”, is a feminine noun.

“A woman within the People of God is a daughter, a sister, a mother,” he said, adding “womanhood speaks to us of fruitful welcome, nurturing and life-giving dedication”.

He did not give any details about potential plans for reform.

The university statement called the pope’s position on women’s roles in society “deterministic and reductive”.

“We are really shocked,” said Valentine Hendrix, a 22-year-old student. “He reduces us to a role of childbearer, mother, wife, everything we want to emancipate ourselves from.”

Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, a climatologist at UCLouvain university, said Francis had “failed to rise to the occasion.”

“To reply that the Church is a woman is really missing the point of the question – about the Church’s respect for women and their role in the institution and in society,” he said.

Earlier the pope visited the tomb of Belgium’s King Baudouin who in 1990 famously refused to sign a law lifting penalties against abortion, citing personal convictions.

Francis described the legislation – passed after the king temporarily renounced his functions to avoid having to endorse it – as “a murderous law”.

Francis has faced criticism during events throughout his trip to Belgium. The country’s king and prime minister called on the pope to take more concrete actions to help survivors of abuse by Catholic clergy, and a rector at a different Catholic university asked him to reconsider the Catholic church’s ban on ordaining women as priests.

UCLouvain is a French-speaking university in Belgium. It has 38,000 students studying across 20 faculties.

The Catholic church has an all-male clergy. Francis has created two commissions to consider whether women could serve as deacons, who, like priests, are ordained, but cannot celebrate Mass, but has not moved forward on the issue.

However, during his 11 years as pontiff, Francis has also changed the Vatican’s primary governing document to allow women to lead departments, and has also allowed women to vote at major global meetings of bishops, known as synods, for the first time.

The pope’s three-day Belgium visit has been dominated by the Church’s dark legacy of child sexual abuse, and saw him meet on Friday with 17 victims.

The group shared their stories and expressed their expectations to the pope, who “took note” of their requests, according to the Vatican.

Belgium has been rocked by decades of abuse scandals and cover-ups and a hard-hitting documentary last year put the issue back on front pages, prompting new victims to come forward.

In an open letter this month, some had demanded the pontiff address paedophilia and set up a process for financial reparations.

On Saturday morning, during a gathering with clergy and pastoral workers at the vast Basilica of the Sacred Heart in Brussels, Francis was pressed on the issue for a second day running.

Replying to a question by a representative of an organisation helping abuse victims, the pontiff acknowledged the “atrocious suffering and wounds” caused by the Church.

“There is a need for a great deal of mercy to keep us from hardening our hearts before the suffering of victims, so that we can help them feel our closeness,” Francis said.

Reuters and Agence France-Presse contributed to this report

Australia’s infamous magpies have started to attack – but they’re not the only birds you might fall victim to this swooping season.

Lesser known suspects including noisy miners, butcherbirds and masked lapwings also swoop to protect their eggs and young, typically between August and October.

Unlike magpies, which Sean Dooley from BirdLife Australia said tended to fly “behind you and hit you hard”, other birds take a different approach.

Magpie-larks (which resemble but are unrelated to magpies) and noisy miners tend to dive in from the front.

“I’ve even had a magpie-lark hover in front of me with its claws out as it tries to drive you away [from its young] … so they can cause some severe damage, especially if they come into contact with your eyes,” Dooley said.

Masked lapwings, also known as spur-winged plovers, will swoop “aggressively and make a really big clattering noise”, in contrast with other plovers, which typically run away and pretend to be injured to distract potential threats, according to Dooley.

He said the swoop of the noisy miner, previously described by the Australian National University ecologist Richard Beggs as “Australia’s most hated bird”, was also big on bluff.

The miners are also known to grab people’s food, according to Dr Meg Edwards, a lecturer in wildlife science at the University of Southern Queensland, who was swooped while picnicking in a park. They also take on much bigger birds, including kites and eagles, if they fear they are getting too close to their nests.

While it may seem as though Australia’s birds set the rules at this time of year, Edwards said the majority did not swoop, and just 10% of magpies are estimated to do so.

An article published in the journal Clinical & Experimental Ophthalmology found that while 40% of all bird-related eye injuries at Victorian Royal Eye and Ear hospital between 1 January 2006 and 31 December 2022 were magpie-inflicted, the magpie-lark was the second main culprit, contributing to 6% of cases. In almost half of cases, the species responsible was not identified.

Edwards advised avoiding nests during the breeding season – between July and November – but said even the most cautious could still be swooped. “In the animal world, we can never say anything’s a guarantee … never say never.”

Even Dooley, who has studied birds for almost his whole life, went 20 years without being swooped at a particular site before being dived-bombed unexpectedly one night.

He said swooping was more common in populated areas where birds “can’t keep a tally of who’s a friend and who’s a foe”.

Dooley stressed that individual birds only swoop for a few weeks and urged people to understand why they did so, which he said would make them “less likely to want to take retribution” and help them strategise to stay safe.

He recommends “getting out of the area as quickly and as calmly as you can”, which will not “exacerbate and entrench the view the bird has that you’re a threat”.

The Magpie Alert tracker has recorded 2,157 magpie swoops so far this year, resulting in 279 injuries.

In 1990, I was 24 and well on my way to enjoying a career as an actor. I’d joined a local band on Sydney’s northern beaches, and we played gigs most weekends up and down the New South Wales coast.

At the time, it felt like Ali was omnipresent as the cover girl queen of Dolly, Cleo and Cosmo magazines. It seemed liked every newsagent had a poster out the front with her megawatt smile and sparkling eyes. One day, while I was at those magazine publishing offices for a photoshoot, I walked by her latest cover on the wall and commented on her beauty.

“Have you met her,” asked the photographer I was with. “Nah,” I said, in a trying-to-be-cool kind of way. “Do you want to?” My attempt at cool instantly evaporated as I blurted, “Of course!”

A week later, after cancelling a gig to be there, Ali and I (surrounded by three bandmates who also wanted to meet her) were being introduced in a nightclub. I was instantly struck by her sparkling aura; she confessed she’d had couple of vodka tonics. We chatted for an hour and I promised to call her the next day – which I did. I don’t think we spent many days apart after that.

She was kind, her humour was whip fast, and as much as I enjoyed laughing with her, what I loved most was the sound of her laugh.

After a month of dating I invited Ali on a road trip to my favourite hideaway, Yamba. It’s a not-so-secret place nowadays, but back then it was a quiet fishing town with access to excellent surf breaks and fibro cottages for rent. We would celebrate her 21st birthday there.

Yamba was at her sparkling best and we’d spent an afternoon on my boat, fishing on the Clarence River, when the breeze began to freshen, taking the heat out of the day. We headed home, crossing back over the channel and past the old oyster beds when the boat ramp came into view in the late afternoon sun.

We were travelling fairly fast and it was difficult to read the wind’s direction; one thing was sure, it was blowing hard enough to whip up chop, which always made the task of getting the boat back on to the trailer troublesome.

As we drew closer, we felt the full brunt of the breeze on our backs. One question burned my brain: how are we going to do this?

The plan was to hop out in shallows, and Ali would hold the boat – my 18ft wooden Riviera-style cruiser, a heavy beast – off the ramp while I retrieved the car and backed the trailer down the ramp (a challenge for my dyslexic brain). The wooden hull never liked the scraping on an unforgiving concrete ramp so I had to move fast.

So far, so good. Ali was waist-deep in water clutching the bowline and gave me an assuring look that she could do her part. After a couple of false starts and with more luck than skill, I was able to swing the trailer down the ramp – but Ali was no longer where I left her. The relentless chop and breeze had pushed her a few boat-lengths away from the ramp and she was fighting hard to keep the boat off the rocky shore.

She had naively but bravely put herself between the boat and the shore which would have given even the hardest of men fits. Her slight frame was thumped by the hull as each wave crashed into its opposite side. The look of relief (or was it WTF?!) she gave me as I appeared, I’ll never forget.

We dragged the boat into deeper water and swung the stern around. Using the last of our strength I fought to keep the hull straight while Ali attached the winch-line and began hand-winding the boat on to the trailer.

We howled with delight as the old girl ground into the trailer’s cradle where the wind and chop could no longer have their wicked way. Twenty minutes after landing, we miraculously drove up the ramp, boat secure, and into the twilight. Exhausted.

Later at our accommodation, Ali was exiting a hot shower when I caught sight of her naked hip and back – it looked like a hot mess of purple and red welts!

“Have you seen your back?” I exclaimed. “When did you get those?”

“Holding your boat off the ramp. You’re welcome,” she said, as she continued to dry herself. Not a word of complaint, not a scratch on the boat, but Ali’s actions that afternoon that helped me understand that this gorgeously funny, brave and resilient woman was my person.

And yet, the truth about falling in love with Ali isn’t really about a moment, it’s about a lifetime. And what a lifetime; it’s included 25 years living in Los Angeles, and raising three incredible humans who make us so proud. We’ve weathered storms, but we’ve also shared victories, an ever-deepening friendship and wonderfully simple moments of love.

After almost 33 years of marriage, I am so grateful and fortunate to walk with Ali. I wouldn’t trade it for anything. And her laugh is still one of the most pleasing things I know.

Australia’s first major waste-to-energy power plant has begun accepting rubbish, marking the start of a contentious nationwide shift towards burning household refuse to generate electricity.

At least 10 developments are under way across the country, sparking concern from some conservationists who argue the trend will be environmentally damaging and at odds with plans to develop a circular economy.

Local councils have started sending truckloads of garbage to Kwinana Energy Recovery facility, south of Perth, as the country’s first commercial-scale project heads towards full-scale operation.

The Kwinana plant is designed to burn up to 460,000 tonnes of non-recyclable waste annually – about a quarter of the amount Perth sends to landfill.

Another 300,000-tonne-a-year generator is under construction just down the road at East Rockingham. Four licences to build major waste-to-energy facilities have been issued in Victoria and there are proposals in New South Wales, Queensland and South Australia. Combined, the projects in development would have the capacity to incinerate 2m tonnes of waste a year – a quarter of what Australian households throw away.

Waste-to-energy has experienced a surge of interest in Australia as landfills near capacity. Proponents say it could mean an end to landfill, and that air pollution and ash can be managed under existing environmental regulations. ​

But not everyone is convinced. The environmental group Zero Waste Australia calls the approach “the most polluting and expensive way to generate energy and manage waste” and has raised concerns about the environmental and health consequences.

Jane Bremmer, the group’s campaign coordinator, says the number of waste-to-energy proposals is “gobsmacking”, and a sign the “incineration industry” is trying to gain a foothold in Australia as it was being pushed out of Europe, where some plants are being decommissioned.

Better than landfill?

The City of Gosnells, a council with 130,000 residents south-east of Perth, is among 10 local governments sending waste to Kwinana to be burnt.

The city’s mayor, Terresa Lynes, says the change comes after a decade of planning, and a long-term contract with the facility shields ratepayers from increasing and unpredictable landfill levies.

“This is the end of landfill for the City of Gosnells,” she says, with power produced an added benefit. The council is focusing on recycling and green waste too, she says, emphasising waste-to-energy is only “part of the solution”.

In recent years, circular economy and waste policies in Western Australia, Victoria, NSW, Queensland, South Australia and Tasmania have preferred waste to energy over landfill for disposing of non-recyclable waste. However, the practice is prohibited in the ACT.

Jennifer Macklin, a circular economy researcher with the Monash Sustainable Development Institute, says the underlying principle of a circular economy is to keep materials circulating at their highest value for as long as possible, for example through repair and reuse.

The waste-to-energy process – which typically involves burning non-recyclable waste in large furnaces at high temperatures to generate electricity or heat – is the “lowest value way of circulating” because the value in the materials is lost, she says.

Using the energy “definitely offered a small benefit over landfill”, Macklin says, but poses a larger risk to higher-value reuse and recycling efforts.

She says evidence from other countries indicates recycling rates can plateau after the introduction of waste-to-energy plants, partly because once the infrastructure is built “you’re locked in feeding it”.

The arrival of waste to energy can also dampen motivation and participation in reuse and recycling at the household, organisation and even government level, she says.

The NSW chief scientist, Prof Hugh Durrant-Whyte, provided independent advice on the technology to the NSW government in 2020. He said waste to energy was well established in Europe, but as some countries improved their waste reduction, sorting, reuse and recycling efforts, some facilities were being decommissioned. “They’re shutting them down, not because of air emissions but because they no longer have the waste to actually burn.”

Across Europe, there are about 500 waste-to-energy plants, but circular economy efforts have led some countries to reduce their reliance on the technology. Denmark, for example, plans to reduce waste incineration capacity by 30% between 2020 and 2030.

Is power from plastic renewable?

Gayle Sloan, CEO of the Waste Management and Resource Recovery Association, says waste combustion is better for the climate than creating methane in landfills. “We shouldn’t be throwing things in the ground. If we can’t recover it, we should be using it for energy,” she says.

Government policies support the approach as an option for residual waste – the materials left over after recyclable, green and food wastes have been removed. In many states, that’s the “red bin” waste, containing soft plastics, nappies and synthetic textiles.

In Australia, energy produced by burning plastics is not renewable even though projects promote their power as clean and green.

Acciona, owner of the Kwinana facility, says converting waste into energy “addresses both the waste crisis and the need for clean, reliable power in WA”.

The WA facilities – Kwinana and East Rockingham – both received funding from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (Arena).

An Arena spokesperson says while the projects demonstrated lower emissions compared to landfill, not all waste-to-energy facilities were “renewable”, and the agency did not intend to support any new funding applications. “Arena’s investment priorities do not align with investing in further projects incinerating waste for energy.”

Durrant-Whyte says: “I would hesitate to call it renewable energy. But is it better than digging a hole and putting it in the ground? Yes.”

Bremmer says contrary to industry claims, waste-to-energy doesn’t divert waste from landfill. Combustion converts the material into smaller volumes of toxic waste ash, which is then disposed of as hazardous waste.

A better solution would be to shift away from a focus on disposal and move towards a more sustainable, zero waste model, she says.

“The industry is really being pitched as being part of a circular economy, but it’s a linear process.” Those materials are lost forever, Bremmer says. “You can’t get that back and reuse or recycle it. It’s gone.”

When Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, told reporters in New York on Friday that the coming days will determine the future path of the Middle East, he could not have been more prescient, even if at the time he was hoping that Hezbollah and Israel could be persuaded to step back from the brink.

Now, with the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah confirmed killed, the region, after 11 months, has finally stepped over the brink and into a place it has truly never been before.

All eyes will turn to the response by Tehran. It faces the fateful choice it has always sought to avoid and one its new reformist leadership in particular did not wish to make.

If it simply angrily condemns Israel for the destruction of the centrepiece of the axis of resistance that it has laboriously built up over so many years, or calls on others to take unspecified action, Iran’s credibility is in jeopardy.

But pragmatism may lead Iran to advise Hezbollah to absorb the losses and accept a ceasefire that does not also bring about a ceasefire in Gaza, Hezbollah’s stated objective.

If on the other hand Iran instead launches a direct military reprisal against Israel, it has to be meaningful. It knows it will be going into battle against a military that has proved the deadly value of its vastly superior technological and intelligence capabilities. Israel’s intelligence has clearly penetrated deep inside Hezbollah and may have done the same in Tehran.

For the new president, Masoud Pezeshkian, elected on a ticket of lifting economic sanctions partly by building better relations with the west, Nasrallah’s death could not come at a worse time.

His foreign minister, Sayeed Abbas Araghchi, had just spent a full week in New York on the sidelines of the UN general assembly, meeting European politicians such as Germany’s foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock and the British foreign secretary, David Lammy, in an attempt to persuade them to reopen talks to restore the nuclear deal that was sealed in 2015 – and Donald Trump tore up in 2018.

Rafael Grossi, the head of the UN nuclear inspectorate, had been impressed by what he heard from the meetings, saying: “I think this is the moment when it is possible to do something about the nuclear issue. The advantage of Mr Araghchi is that he knows everything about this process so he allows it to move faster”. Nasrallah’s killing makes it that much harder for the reformists to persuade the Iranian military that an olive branch still makes any sense.

Pezeshkian had already been complaining that he had received little in return for listening to western-inspired pleas not to seek immediate revenge for the killing of Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas leader assassinated by Israel in Tehran.

Pezeshkian said he had been promised that a Gaza ceasefire deal that would see the release of hostages and Palestinian political prisoners was only a week or two away. The deal never materialised because, in Iran’s eyes, the US refused to put the pressure required on Benjamin Netanyahu to accept the ceasefire terms.

Let down once, Pezeshkian is hardly inclined to believe US vows that it had no prior knowledge of the plan to kill Nasrallah – and, anyway, Netanyahu might have sanctioned his death from a hotel bedroom in New York, but it was US-supplied bombs that exploded in Beirut.

In what is likely to be a holding statement, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, called on Muslims on Saturday “to stand by the people of Lebanon and the proud Hezbollah with whatever means they have and assist them in confronting the … wicked regime [of Israel]”.

For Washington, this is a diplomatic humiliation and a display of its inability, or refusal, to control its troublesome ally.

Netanyahu hopes to have played American diplomats for fools in New York. The US state department insists it had a clear understanding on the basis of conversations with Ron Dermer, Israel’s strategic affairs minister, and Netanyahu that Israel would accept a 21-day ceasefire, and yet as soon as the plan was announced, Netanyahu reneged on the deal.

In some ways, it is the culmination of nearly 12 months of an American strategy that now lies in ruins. Time after time since the 7 October attacks by Hamas, the US has asked Israel to adopt a different strategy over the delivery of food into Gaza, protection zones, a ground offensive in Rafah, the terms of a ceasefire and, above all, over avoiding conflict escalation.

Each time, Netanyahu acknowledged the US position, sidestepped a clear response and then ultimately ignored Washington. Each time, the US – vexed and frustrated – has expressed misgivings about Netanyahu’s strategy, but each time it has continued to pass the ammunition.

With a presidential election near and Netanyahu enjoying a surge in domestic popularity – as well as few Arab states shedding tears about Nasrallah’s demise – the US appears to have few options available. Netanyahu insists he is winning and on course for total victory.

At the moment, unless Iran proves to be more decisive than it has been so far, it is Netanyahu the great survivor who is in the driving seat.

North Carolina’s lieutenant governor, Republican Mark Robinson, received burns on Friday night while attending a truck show as he was campaigning for governor, his campaign said.

Robinson was making an appearance at the Mayberry truck show in Mount Airy when he was injured, campaign spokesperson Mike Lonergan said in a statement.

Robinson was treated at Northern regional hospital in Mount Airy for second-degree burns, he added.

“He is in good spirits, appreciates the outpouring of well wishes, and is excited to return to the campaign trail as scheduled first thing” on Saturday morning, Lonergan said.

Lonergan didn’t immediately respond to texts seeking details on how and where the burns occurred. Robinson had made campaign stops starting on Friday morning with Moore county Republicans. He has four appearances scheduled for Saturday.

Robinson, the lieutenant governor since 2021, is running against Democratic gubernatorial nominee Josh Stein, the current attorney general. The current governor, Roy Cooper, a Democrat, was barred by term limits from running this fall.

Many Republicans have distanced themselves recently from Robinson following a 19 September CNN report alleging he posted strongly worded racial and sexual comments on an online message board. A dozen staff members on his campaign or in his lieutenant governor’s office have quit in the fallout.

Robinson, who has faced criticism for other inflammatory comments, has denied writing the messages more than a decade ago and has hired a law firm to investigate.

Mount Airy, located about 100 miles (161km) north of Charlotte near the Virginia border, is where the late television star Andy Griffith grew up. The community served as the inspiration for the fictional town of Mayberry in The Andy Griffith Show, which aired during the 1960s. City leaders have embraced that history with homages and festivals associated with the show.

Cows may belch methane into the atmosphere at alarming rates, but new data shows they may play an important role in renewing farm soil.

Research by the Soil Association Exchange shows that farms with a mixture of arable crops and livestock have about a third more carbon stored within their soil than those with only arable crops, thanks to the animals’ manure.

This also has an effect on biodiversity: mixed arable and livestock farms support about 28 grassland plant species in every field, compared with 25 for arable-only and 22 for dairy-only.

Joseph Gridley, chief executive of SAE, which was set up by the Soil Association in 2021 to support and measure sustainable farming, said it was unlikely that carbon captured in soil would balance out the enormous amounts of methane created by cattle. Farm livestock around the world creates about 14% of human-induced climate emissions.

“It’s pretty unequivocal in the data that having livestock on your farm does mean you have more emissions – five or six times more emissions,” he said. “But if you integrate livestock into the system, on every metric on soil health, there’s an improvement, and on a lot of the biodiversity measures as well.”

Soils are degrading, but by how much exactly is unclear. In 2015, the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation claimed that the world had only 60 harvests left, but researchers at Oxford University and Our World In Data said in 2021 that there was a complex picture, and that while there were 16% of soils with an expected lifespan of fewer than 100 years, a third were expected to last at least 5,000.

The Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has been investigating so-called methane blockers as a way to reduce emissions. Adding substances such as essential oils, probiotics and even seaweed to cattle feed can reduce the amount of burps and wind they generate.

Last month the Green Alliance charity said that feeding Bovaer, a methane blocker, to a third of the UK’s dairy cows would cut the country’s emissions by about 1%. Yet this is not happening, the campaign group warned, because farmers were unwilling to pay extra for something they did not benefit from. It said methane blockers should be subsidised, as other green farming schemes were.

Kamala Harris has stretched her lead over Donald Trump in the US presidential election race, the latest polling averages show, even while the two candidates appear to be running neck-and-neck in most battleground states.

The Guardian’s newest poll tracker, based on a range of surveys conducted across a 10-day period, shows the vice-president and Democratic nominee at 48.2%, compared with 44.4% for Trump, the Republican candidate and former president – giving Harris a 3.6-point advantage.

That’s one point up from the lead she held a week ago and broadly consistent with most – though not all – recent survey findings.

To put it in perspective, the polling analysis website 538, also known as Five Thirty Eight, gave Harris a 2.9-point advantage on Friday morning, smaller than the Guardian’s advantage but within range. The site translated that into Harris having a 58% chance of winning November’s election, against 42% for Trump.

The caveat is that these figures relate to national polls, while the election outcome is almost certain to be decided by who wins certain key swing states under America’s electoral college system.

Nevertheless, the fact that Harris’s national poll lead may be increasing – even by small margins – may turn out to be significant.

Polling suggests that Harris is likely to win the popular vote – Democratic candidates have done so in five out of the past six presidential elections in the 21st century, yet Republicans eked out a victory in two of those contests.

The first was in 2000, when George W Bush edged out Al Gore – despite losing the nationwide tally by around 540,000 – after a weeks-long court battle to decide who had won Florida, where thousands of ballots were disputed.

More recently, Trump triumphed in the electoral college in 2016 thanks to wafer-thin victory margins in the three blue-wall states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin despite gaining around 2.7m fewer votes than Hillary Clinton across the nation.

The prospects of a repeat 2016 scenario are a recurring nightmare in the minds of many Democrats.

However, Harry Enten, CNN’s data analyst, painted a rosier outlook for Harris stemming from her range of national poll leads. Although his own network’s latest survey gave her only a narrow, one-point advantage, Enten acknowledged that other polls reflected a bigger lead, some as large as six points.

“We talk about these national polls, but the bottom line is, it’s a race to 270 [electoral college votes],” he said. “One way you can kind of get at this is: [what are] Harris’s chances, given a popular vote margin? And what’s the chance you win the electoral college?”

Continuing the theme, Enten argued that Trump would have an electoral college advantage if the national vote were tallied with the CNN poll that gave Harris a single-point lead – but that this would disappear if she were to win the national vote by a wider margin as suggested by other polls and reflected in the Guardian tracker.

“If you model it out, and we sort of get where that CNN poll is – plus one – I think Donald Trump would be favoured in the electoral college. Harris would just have a 33% chance of winning,” he said. “But if you get closer to where the average poll is, a plus-two to plus-three margin, then Harris is a slight favourite in the electoral college.”

The long-standing assumption underpinning that argument – common to pollsters and political partisans alike and reinforced by Trump’s 2016 winning-while-losing feat – is that Republicans have a natural advantage in the electoral college, meaning that a Democratic candidate needs to win the popular vote by a significant margin to be sure of securing the 270 electoral votes essential for victory.

Nate Cohn, the New York Times’ chief poll analyst, argued that there was evidence that this GOP advantage was being eroded.

Cohn detected the trend, counterintuitively, in a New York Times/Siena poll that showed Harris and Trump tied nationally at 47% – while the Democratic nominee is leading by an impressive four points in Pennsylvania, arguably the most important swing state of all.

“There’s growing evidence to support a surprising possibility: [Trump’s] once formidable advantage in the electoral college is not as ironclad as many presumed. Instead, it might be shrinking,” Cohn argued.

He went on: “According to the New York Times’ polling average, it does not seem that Kamala Harris will necessarily need to win the popular vote by much to prevail.”

The reason, roughly summarised, is that while Harris is sustaining narrow leads in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin – three states that would be enough to get the vice-president to the coveted 270 electoral votes – Trump is polling better than four years ago in states he still has little chance of winning.

“On the one hand, Ms Harris is holding her own in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania,” Cohn wrote, while cautioning that her lead was “tenuous”. “The second half of the explanation, oddly, is that Mr Trump is gaining in non-competitive states like New York, improving his position in the national popular vote without helping him in the most important states.”

With just over five weeks to go before polling day, none of this is predictive of a final outcome. But it may just suggest a scenario where the candidate destined for the White House is the one who wins the most votes – which, after all, is how democracy is meant to work.