South West Water has taken a legal stake in a customer’s home after she withheld her bill payments in a protest over sewage dumping in rivers and the sea.

Thousands of water company customers are thought to be withholding payments but this is the first known case of a company enforcing a claim against a customer’s home.

Imogen May, of Crediton, Devon, has withheld payment since 2019 and has a £2,809 debt. South West Water won a county court judgment over the debt and has claimed an interest in May’s cottage via the Land Registry. When it is sold, the company can claim what it says it is owed.

May has also withheld payment of council tax, arguing that the funds are not spent on people’s priorities, such as environmental projects and children’s mental health services. The council is now applying for a court order to force the sale of May’s cottage.

“This is about using my place of privilege as a homeowner to push the boundaries,” she said. “It’s about necessity – unless we challenge them and show them that we’re not frightened of them, they will continue to do what they’re doing.”

“They are killing our water,” May told the Guardian. “Without our water, we are dead. I care deeply about the planet and biodiversity and I just want to inspire people to stop paying these bastards to rip us off.

“The language of money is the only thing they really understand. They can have it by all means when they spend our money on what it’s designed for. But they are openly polluting our waters and I’m done with it.”

May, who works in a bakery, has frequently taken part in environmental protests. She was arrested while blocking Lambeth Bridge in London as part of an Extinction Rebellion protest in 2019 and released without charge. Charges brought over a protest against the HS2 rail development in Buckinghamshire in 2020 were later dismissed.

May’s home is already up for sale as she had decided to downsize after her two daughters left home. She is undecided about what to do once the house is sold, “but if I am set with a choice to pay these bills or go to prison then I’ll pay the bloody bills,” she said. “I’ve promised my kids that I would not end up in prison.”

A spokesperson for South West Water said it did not comment on individual customers’ cases. “We are serious about tackling storm overflows and change of this scale takes time, ambition and increased investment, and that is why we are investing £850m in our region over two years,” he said. “We will also be the first water company to meet the government target of less than 10 spills per overflow, per year, a decade ahead of target.”

South West Water increased its annual dividend to investors to £127m in May. In the same month, 17,000 of its customers had to boil water due to contamination with the cryptosporidium parasite, which results from faecal pollution of water supplies.

Frequent overflows of sewage into rivers and the sea has become a high-profile issue in recent years. Multimillion-pound court fines have been levied against a number of English water companies over their failings, and their large debts and dividend payments to shareholders have become controversial. Thousands of customers are thought to be boycotting their payments, with bill strikes ongoing against all nine companies dealing with wastewater in England.

Julie Wassmer, of Whitstable, Kent, helped found the BoycottWaterBills.com website. She has withheld the sewerage portion of her water bill from Southern Water since 2021, totalling about £1,000.

“We know for a fact that we’ve got boycott action in all the wastewater areas,” she said. “We haven’t got a complete figure on how many people are boycotting nationally but we believe it’s thousands,” based on mailing list numbers and web activity.

Wassmer said the process for complaining to water companies was “not fit for purpose” and that the industry regulator, Ofwat, was ineffective in stemming the sewage pollution. “So there’s no chance of holding the companies to account. The whole thing is just a legalised scam and it’s only benefited the companies, the executives and their shareholders, and people are doing the only thing I think we can do, which is to withhold payment.”

She likened the widespread bills boycott to the successful anti-fracking campaigns in which she has also taken part. “There are so many different people involved and that means we’re hydra-headed and more difficult for the companies to pick us off.”

Caz Dennett, of Weymouth, started the Don’t Pay for Dirty Water campaign with Extinction Rebellion. “It seemed like an obvious action for people to take to truly demonstrate how sickening and scandalous the water company racket is,” she said. She has withheld the sewage charge part of her Wessex Water bill for 14 months and is in dispute with the company over the £940 it says she owes.

Katy Taylor, the chief customer officer at Southern Water, said: “To reduce storm overflows, we have a £1.5bn investment increasing storage capacity and finding ways to divert rain back to the environment naturally.”

A Wessex Water spokesperson said: “We agree [storm overflows] are outdated and we’re currently spending over £3m a month to progressively improve them. Subject to regulatory approval, this investment will double.”

Wassmer said: “Nationalisation appears to be the only way forward. England is the only country in the world to have a fully privatised water industry. So it’s not only a national disgrace, it’s an international disgrace.”

Paola Ferraro marches through the neat grids of vines that chequer the slopes of Monfumo and rattles off the number of ways violent weather hurts her family’s prosecco production.

Spring frost kills buds, summer hail storms thrash leaves, long droughts starve vines of water, while strong rains spark landslides that drown them in mud.

In the rugged hills of Asolo, halfway between the canals of Venice and the peaks of the Dolomites, the farmers that produce prosecco, one of the most popular sparkling wines in the world, have been plunged into crisis mode by the tempestuous weather that has arrived with the climate crisis.

“It feels like there’s no time,” says Ferraro, from Bele Casel winery, whose grandmother lit candles and prayed during once-rare hail storms that have started to hit earlier in the year and pack more of a punch. “It’s changing so fast.”

Climate change is affecting wine producers everywhere. A study in Nature found that by the end of the century 90% of traditional wine regions could disappear from coastal and lowland parts of Spain, Italy, Greece and southern California.

Prosecco is particularly sensitive to volatile weather. When rain falls hard in the “hogback” hills of Valdobbiadene and Conegliano – a Unesco heritage site that, along with Asolo, makes the most exclusive labels – the steep slopes that grow glera grapes can quickly morph into torrents of fast-flowing earth. During long periods of drought, any water that does hit the sun-crusted inclines washes straight off.

“The impact of the two extremes is one thing on a plain, but it’s totally different on a steep slope,” says Paolo Tarolli, of the University of Padova, who studies the effects of climate change on wine terraces.

At the Vinitaly trade fair in Verona, where well-heeled wine dealers swill glasses of their finest, prosecco producers say the sector has only just woken up to the scale of the threat.

Nicola Ceschin, from the Sanfeletto winery, says that in the last couple of years “the debate has been opened, and it has become more and more lively. But in terms of practical action, I don’t know if much has really moved.”

Farmers can adapt to many of the changes, says Gregory Gambetta, a plant biologist at Bordeaux Sciences Agro and co-author of the Nature study. But customers place so much emphasis on a wine’s identity that it is “a completely different beast” to other foods threatened by global heating.

“The big fear is not: ‘I’m going to wake up and the climate change is so extreme I can’t grow grapes any more’,” says Gambetta. “The fear is that: ‘This product we always made – that everyone always loved – that they [the customers] don’t like it any more’.”

Sipped straight or mixed in a spritz, prosecco has had a boom in popularity over the last two decades, but green groups and some people in northern Italy have blamed the scale of the industry’s expansion for damaging the local environment, prompting pledges from producers to better protect ecosystems.

Some farmers have already started to change their practices. Black nets dot the green terraces of Valdobbiadene to guard grapes from hail. Some producers, taking a more experimental approach, have used cannon-style equipment to blast gas into clouds to stop stones from forming.

Others rely on natural solutions; Ferraro uses fig trees to shade the grapes and cool the vines. The trees also encourage a richer mix of wildlife, shelter plants from strong winds and keep soil stable in heavy rain.

There’s a reason trees were planted in vineyards from 100 years ago, says Ferraro. “It’s not just because they look good.”

Scientists have also looked to the past to deal with drought. Just a few generations ago, says Tarolli, farmers often built small ponds into the slopes to collect water. These “microwater storage systems” are still a common sight on terraces in south-east Asia and east Africa, he says, but the practice has mostly been lost in northern Italy.

To help farmers save water, Tarolli flies drones over slopes to build 3D models with which he can simulate rainfall patterns. He then uses these to find the best areas to build ponds, which farmers can connect to drip irrigation systems to water drier parts of the vineyard.

“It’s a low-cost intervention,” says Tarolli. “A mixture of ancient knowledge merged with modern technology.”

But even as such practices begin to take off, farmers say they have little control over the increasingly violent weather. At the Bresolin vineyard, which was founded by three brothers from a winemaking family who wanted to turn to organic farming, the years of drought and hail have led to a constant state of acute stress.

“The stress of the plant and the stress of the producer increases every year,” says Valentina Pozza, Bresolin’s export manager. “It’s your job, it’s your life, you live thanks to what the vineyards give to you.”

Though they try to adapt, she says, the lack of certainty leaves farmers feeling powerless.

“You cannot decide if there will be drought or rain or hail,” she says. “You wait and hope that everything will be OK. You try to do the best you can, but it’s not you who decides.”

Retired Maj Gen William Anders, the former Apollo 8 astronaut who took the famous Earthrise photo showing the planet as a shadowed blue marble from space in 1968, was killed Friday when the plane he was piloting alone plummeted into the waters off the San Juan Islands in Washington state. He was 90.

“The family is devastated,” said his son, retired air force Lt Col Greg Anders, who confirmed the death to the Associated Press. “He was a great pilot and we will miss him terribly.”

The former astronaut had said the photo was his most significant contribution to the space program, given the ecological philosophical impact it had, along with making sure the Apollo 8 command module and service module worked.

A report came in around 11.40am that an older-model plane had crashed into the water and sunk near the north end of Jones Island, the San Juan county sheriff Eric Peter said.

Only the pilot was on board the Beech A45 airplane at the time, according to the Federal Aviation Association.

Arizona Senator Mark Kelly, who is also a retired Nasa astronaut, wrote on the social platform X: “Bill Anders forever changed our perspective of our planet and ourselves with his famous Earthrise photo on Apollo 8. He inspired me and generations of astronauts and explorers. My thoughts are with his family and friends.”

William Anders said in a 1997 Nasa oral-history interview that he hadn’t thought the Apollo 8 mission was risk-free but that there were important national, patriotic and exploration reasons for going ahead. He had estimated there was about a one-in-three chance that the crew wouldn’t make it back, the same chance the mission would be a success and the same chance the mission wouldn’t start. He said he suspected Christopher Columbus had sailed with worse odds.

Anders had once recounted the experience as part of a BBC documentary on the mission. He recalled how Earth had looked fragile and seemingly physically insignificant, yet was home.

After two or three orbits around the moon, he and the crew began shooting photographs.

“We’d been going backwards and upside down, didn’t really see the Earth or the sun, and when we rolled around and came around and saw the first Earthrise,” he said. “That certainly was, by far, the most impressive thing. To see this very delicate, colorful orb, which to me looked like a Christmas tree ornament coming up over this very stark, ugly lunar landscape really contrasted.”

“I don’t know who said it, maybe all of us said: ‘Oh my God. Look at that!’” Anders said.

“And up came the Earth. We had had no discussion on the ground, no briefing, no instructions on what to do. I jokingly said, ‘Well, it’s not on the flight plan,’ and the other two guys were yelling at me to give them cameras. I had the only color camera with a long lens. So I floated a black-and-white over to Borman. I can’t remember what Lovell got. They were all yelling for cameras and we started snapping away.”

The photo of the thrilling swirl of life that is Earth on a backdrop of black space and a foreground of dull, lifeless moonscape became an icon of space travel and the defining image of our living world and its fragility.

The National Transportation Safety Board and FAA are investigating the crash.

Anders and his wife, Valerie, founded the Heritage Flight Museum in Washington state in 1996. It is now based at a regional airport in Burlington and features 15 aircraft, several antique military vehicles, a library and many artifacts donated by veterans, according to the museum’s website. Two of their sons helped them run it.

The couple moved to Orcas Island, in the San Juan archipelago, in 1993, and kept a second home in their hometown of San Diego, according to a biography on the museum’s website. They had six children and 13 grandchildren.

Associated Press contributed reporting

A 19-year-old who fatally shot an unhoused woman with a pellet gun in southern California was sentenced to five years and eight months in state prison on Thursday.

William Innes pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter in the killing last May of Annette Pershal, 68, who was living on the streets of San Diego and nicknamed “Granny Annie”. The case sparked national outrage after prosecutors reported that Innes had texted a group chat saying he was going “hobo hunting”.

Innes’s co-defendant, 19-year-old Ryan Hopkins, pleaded guilty last year to aiding and abetting assault with a deadly weapon and was sentenced to one year in jail. Police and prosecutors say that Hopkins drove Innes to the spot where Pershal had been camping, and that Innes fired multiple rounds at the woman with a pellet gun, hitting her in the head, leg and torso. Pershal, who was well-known in the neighborhood, was found unconscious and transported to a hospital, where doctors discovered she had been shot. She died several days later.

Brandy Nazworth, Pershal’s daughter, who attended the sentencing hearing, said in an interview on Friday that she felt the five-year sentence was appropriate: “Trying to understand this situation is impossible. I’m never really going to get closure, and none of it is going to make sense. It was a bad decision [Innes] made, but it shouldn’t affect his whole life.

“My mom always told me two wrongs don’t make a right,” she continued. “And me hoping for the worst for him isn’t going to bring me any more closure.”

Nazworth traveled to San Diego from Louisiana, where she lives, so she could share her mother’s story at the hearing: “I want to make sure she is remembered.”

In her victim impact statement, Nazworth said her mother’s friends had called her the “queen of Serra Mesa”, a reference to her San Diego neighborhood: “She had a great sense of humor, an infectious smile, and was a human library of San Diego history and stories.”

She also recounted the ways her mother had helped others on the street, giving her umbrella away to a young unhoused woman during a rainstorm, saying: “When a man ran out of gas in front of the sidewalk she slept on, she gave him some of her food money so he could get home. And she was grateful for every little thing that people did for her.”

After her death, two dozen people showed up for her memorial and left flowers at the spot of her killing, Nazworth said: “She was a person, not just a thing to be used for target practice. Her life mattered to me and my kids and her friends.”

Nazworth addressed some of her remarks to the defendant, saying: “I have no words for how angry and sad I am. But as a mother, I am not looking for revenge and take no joy in the harm you have done to yourself and your family. My only prayer and hope is that my mother did not suffer and die for nothing. The only good that can come from this senseless tragedy is if you use it to become a better man. She may have looked like just a dirty homeless person to you, but she was still my mom and the grandmother to my kids.”

She also recalled her mother’s many struggles, including losing her home and possessions, suffering the deaths of close friends, the sudden passing of her boyfriend and worsening arthritis – all of which contributed to her alcoholism. Nazworth said: “Alcohol use disorder is a serious disease … like cancer. Would you shoot a cancer patient with a pellet gun for fun?”

Nazworth added that she had tried many times to get her mother to live with her in Louisiana, “but she just couldn’t imagine leaving the neighborhood she grew up in and we couldn’t force her to go. She had a lot of friends, and her neighborhood was all she had left of the happier life she remembered.”

She also noted that local agencies had not been able to help her mother find appropriate housing.

Lawyers for both teenagers have sought to shift blame on to their co-defendants in court, but Innes’s lawyer said on Thursday that his client was “being punished appropriately”.

In court, Innes addressed the victim’s family, NBC 7 San Diego reported, saying: “I can’t change what happened, but I wish I could. That’s the only thing I can say that hopefully will make you feel better about what happened, which it probably never will.”

A high-seas shootout pitting drug runners against the law ended with the smugglers’ boat at the bottom of the Caribbean Sea and the US Coast Guard seizing $63m worth of cocaine, authorities in Florida said on Friday.

The dramatic encounter took place on Tuesday about 25 miles (40km) north of Puerto Cabello, Venezuela, when the coast guard cutter Resolute – patrolling with the Dutch navy ship Groningen – identified a vessel in international waters suspected of carrying narcotics, according to a press release from the USCG south-east region.

The crew of a joint forces fast interception craft fired on the suspected smugglers when the “non-compliant vessel” was turned at speed towards them, and the boat caught fire and sank. The US and Dutch sailors acted “in self-defense and defense of others in response to the life-threatening situation”, the press release said.

On Friday, the US Coast Guard and Dutch authorities said they had called off an air and sea search for the three persons onboard the boat, who went overboard when it caught alight.

A day earlier, the Coast Guard said in a tweet published on Thursday, Resolute docked at Port Everglades, Florida, and unloaded more than 4,800lb (2,177kg) of cocaine – valued at about $63m – recovered from the scene.

There were no reported injuries to any members of the joint law enforcement operation, officials said.

“Our crews work hard to safely bring suspected smugglers to face federal prosecution in the US for alleged crimes,” Lt Cmdr John Beal, public affairs officer for USCG district seven, headquartered in Miami, said in a statement.

“The missions our coast guard service members and allied partners do every day to deny transnational criminal organizations access to maritime smuggling routes are inherently dangerous. The decision to suspend active search efforts is not one we take lightly, and the coast guard is working to investigate the incident in accordance with coast guard policy.”

The region is one of the coast guard’s busiest for encounters with drug smugglers – as well as interdictions at sea of migrants attempting to reach the US.

Also on Friday, in a separate case, the crew of the coast guard cutter Charles David Jr offloaded 540lb (245kg) of cocaine in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and transferred nine suspected smugglers into the custody of the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).

The cocaine, worth $7.4m, according to another USCG press release, was seized in the early hours of Monday after the USCG cutter Heriberto Hernández located a suspect vessel about 75 miles (121km) south of St Croix in the US Virgin Islands.

“The crew observed the occupants of the suspect vessel jettison multiple packages overboard,” the statement said, adding that nine men arrested onboard the boat claimed to be Venezuelan nationals.

“The cutter crew … recovered multiple packages of the jettisoned cargo and seized a total of 10 bales and two additional bags, with individual packages, which tested positive for cocaine.”

Denise Foster, DEA special agent in charge of the investigation, said: “The successful interdiction and seizure underscore the relentless commitment and collaboration of our federal, local, and regional partners in combating drug trafficking in the Caribbean.”

The United Nations has added Israel to the global list of states and armed groups who have committed violations against children, according to the country’s UN envoy, Gilad Erdan.

News of Israel’s inclusion on the list follows eight months of war on Gaza, in which more than 13,000 children are estimated to be among the 36,500 killed, and comes a day after the Israeli bombing of a UN school in central Gaza, which killed more than 40 Palestinians, some of them children.

According to human rights officials, Hamas is also named in the report for its killing and kidnapping of children in its 7 October attack on Israel, in which nearly 1,200 Israelis were killed.

Erdan said he was “shocked and disgusted” by the “shameful” decision to include Israel on this year’s list, which is part of a report on children and armed conflict due to be presented to the UN security council next Friday.

The report covers the killing, maiming, sexual abuse, abduction or recruitment of children, denial of aid access and targeting of schools and hospitals.

The report is compiled by the UN secretary general’s special representative for children and armed conflict, Virginia Gamba. The list attached to the report, is widely intended to name and shame parties to conflicts in the hope of deterring violence against children.

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, issued a statement that the UN had “added itself to the black list of history when it joined those who support the Hamas murderers”.

Israel Katz, Israel’s foreign minister, warned that the decision would have an impact on his country’s relations with the UN, which are already very strained. It is refusing to deal with the UN Relief and Works Agency (Unrwa), the main organisation channeling aid to Palestinian refugees in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria.

There have been claims by UN staff that Israel had been left off the list of offenders in previous years after political pressure from Israeli officials.

“There have been already a few years in which there have been verified violations by Israel government forces and by Palestinian armed groups, but they have never been listed,” Ezequiel Heffes, the director of the human rights group, Watchlist on Children and Armed Conflict.

Heffes said that once a state or a group had been cited in the UN report for violations, the UN is supposed to engage with the parties, and “for those parties to take actions that may serve to prevent future violations”.

The UN had been in discussion in previous years with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and Palestinian armed groups, seeking the persuade them to mitigate harm to children, he added.

“This is a big deal because this is a framework that is created to protect children from the effects of armed conflict,” Heffes said.

Erdan said he had been notified of the decision by the chief of staff to the UN secretary general, António Guterres, and he gave his response in a video on social media.

“I am utterly shocked and disgusted by this shameful decision of the secretary-general,” said Erdan. “Israel’s army is the most moral army in the world, so this immoral decision will only aid the terrorists and reward Hamas.”

There was no immediate comment from Guterres’s office on the list.

Clarence Thomas, the US supreme court justice, officially disclosed he took luxury vacations paid for by the conservative billionaire, Harlan Crow – something he had yet to acknowledge in the official record.

The right-leaning justice has updated a financial disclosure to the court to confirm the Crow-funded travel, to Indonesia and a men’s club in California, amending a previous version.

He belatedly reported travel paid for by others from 2019: a hotel room in Bali and food and lodging in Sonoma county, California, both were paid for by Crow . He did not report any travel paid by others last year.

ProPublica first revealed the trips in April 2023, but Thomas, had not previously included them in court financial disclosure records, which are updated annually, although he had acknowledged publicly the “hospitality”. ProPublica’s reporting on Thomas and Crow won the Pulitzer Prize for public service this year.

The filing only offers a brief explanation of why Thomas is now disclosing the expenses. “During the preparation and filing of this report, filer sought and received guidance from his accountant and ethics counsel,” the report says.

Following ProPublica’s reporting last year, Thomas released a statement acknowledging travel with Crow, but said Crow, a Republican megadonor, did not have business before the court. Thomas previously said he had been advised that he did not have to report “this sort of personal hospitality from close personal friends”.

But Crow was affiliated with Club for Growth, which has lobbied the court with amicus briefs while Thomas has sat on it, the Guardian reported last year.

ProPublica has also reported that Thomas sold his mother’s home in Savannah, Georgia to Crow (Thomas disclosed the transaction last year after the report). Thomas also disclosed that his wife, Ginni, received income from consulting she did on behalf of various conservative organizations, Politico reported. Thomas has faced pressure to recuse himself on cases involving January 6 over his wife’s ties to the right, but he has refused so far.

Thomas received 103 gifts totaling $2.4m, according to an analysis by Fix the Court, a watchdog group. The total dollar amount he received is ten times what his fellow justices combined received over the same period.

Thomas’ relationship with Crow set off calls for more transparency by the justices and calls for more transparency. ProPublica also reported last year that Samuel Alito, another of the court’s conservative justices, flew on a private jet and vacationed with a billionaire who had business before the court. Alito was granted a 90-day extension to file his report, something he has routinely sought.

Alito is also under scrutiny after reports from the New York Times that there was an upside down flag flying outside of his home in Virginia as well as an appeal to heaven flag flying outside of a beach home in New Jersey. The former is affiliated with the January 6 attack on the capitol and the latter with Christian nationalism.

The supreme court’s nine justices all agreed to a code of conduct last year, though some experts have noted it does not go far enough and there is no way to adequately enforce it.

The newest justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson, collected nearly $900,000 last year for her upcoming memoir, one of four supreme court justices who reported sizable income from book deals. Jackson also disclosed that Beyoncé gave her four tickets worth $3,700.

The first heatwave of the year is expected to maintain its grip on the US south-west for at least another day through Friday, after records tumbled across the region with temperatures soaring past 110F (43C) from California to Arizona.

Although the official start of summer is still two weeks away, roughly half of Arizona and Nevada were under an excessive heat alert, which the National Weather Service extended until Friday evening. The alert was extended through Saturday in Las Vegas, where it’s never been hotter this early in the year.

“High temperatures as much as 10 to 15 degrees above normal can be expected, with record high temperatures likely for some sites through Friday,” the weather service in Las Vegas said. Temperatures will slowly retreat over the weekend, but will remain above normal into early next week.

“It’s so hot,” said Eleanor Wallace, nine, who was visiting Phoenix from northern Utah on Thursday on a hike celebrating her birthday with her mother, Megan Wallace.

The National Weather Service in Phoenix, where the new record high of 113F on Thursday leap-frogged the old mark of 111F set in 2016, called the conditions “dangerously hot”.

There were no immediate reports of any heat-related deaths or serious injuries.

But at a campaign rally for the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump, in Phoenix, 11 people fell ill from heat exhaustion by late afternoon and were taken to the hospital, where they were treated and released, fire officials said.

And in Las Vegas, with a new record of 111F on Thursday that also matched the earliest time of year the high reached at least 110F, the Clark county fire department said it had responded to at least 12 calls for heat exposure since midnight on Wednesday. Nine of those calls resulted in a patient needing hospital treatment.

Several other areas of Arizona, California and Nevada also broke records by a degree or two, including Death Valley national park with a record high for the date of 122F, topping 121F dating to 1996 in the desert that sits 194ft (59 meters) below sea level near the California-Nevada line. Records there date to 1911.

The heat has arrived weeks earlier than usual even in places farther to the north at higher elevations – areas typically a dozen degrees cooler. That includes Reno, where the normal high of 81F for this time of year soared to a record 98F on Thursday. Records there date to 1888.

The National Weather Service forecast mild cooling across the region this weekend, but only by a few degrees. In central and southern Arizona, that will still mean triple-digit highs, even up to 110F.

On Thursday in Phoenix, the unseasonably hot weather did not prevent Oscar Tomasio of Cleveland, Ohio, from proposing to his girlfriend, Megan McCracken, as they attempted to hike to the peak of a trail on Camelback Mountain with three liters of water each in tow.

“It was a grueling hike,” Tomasio told the Associated Press. “It was extra hot, so we started extra early.”

“The views were beautiful. We didn’t make it quite to the top because she was a little nervous with the heat,” he said. “So I proposed to her when the sun rose.”

McCracken confirmed they’d planned a sunrise hike and awoke about 5am in an effort to beat the heat and an impending closure of the trail.

“Probably not early enough,” she said.

Megan Wallace, mother of the birthday girl from Utah who also came packing water bottles, said: “We started just a few minutes after six and it’s like we came prepared, but we got through all of our water and it was hot – was hotter than we’re used to.”

A few hundred metres from her house, Rosemary Lewis stands at a clearing on a footpath overlooking a tract of rolling hills in the Oxfordshire countryside that could become home to UK’s largest solar farm. With plans to install 2.5m solar panels along an 11-mile (18km) stretch north of Oxford, the Botley West solar farm would be vast.

The proposal is one of 30 large-scale solar projects vying for approval, which could give the UK a much-needed shot in the arm to achieve its climate goals of generating 100% clean electricity by 2035 and reaching net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

But Lewis sees it differently. “It’s a nightmare,” she says of the proposal that would spread across 1,400 hectares (3,500 acres) of mostly green belt land. Her husband, Tom, says: “It’s just too big. We will be living on an industrial site.”

Large-scale solar farms have become the latest net zero technology to be bogged down by local disputes and polarising debates across the country. A growing coalition of grassroots groups argue that the ballooning pipeline of solar developments would “armour-plate” the countryside, destroy good farmland and threaten food security. Instead, they want to see solar “in the right places”, on rooftops and brownfield sites.

Conservative MPs, representing the rural constituencies where these solar proposals are concentrated, have given their support to calls for stricter rules to regulate solar on farmland.

However, while most experts agree that a lack of land use and energy planning has led to a suboptimal and opportunistic approach to solar deployment, large-scale solar is one of the key building blocks of the UK’s climate plan. “Solar on farmland is an important part of energy decarbonisation,” said Tom Lancaster, of the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU).

To decarbonise the electricity system, the Conservative government said it would increase solar capacity nearly fivefold to 70GW by 2035 and called for “large-scale ground-mounted solar deployment across the UK” – one of the cheapest forms of electricity generation. To balance energy security and food production, it told developers to prioritise poorer-quality land and avoid using the best farmland for large projects “where possible”.

The Botley West proposal goes to the heart of the issue. The solar farm would cost £950m to build on land predominantly leased by the Blenheim estate, 38% of which is considered “best and most versatile” agricultural land. Campaigners have been lobbying the government to change the rules and restrict large-scale solar on farmland even of moderate quality.

This “would basically do to solar what has been done to onshore wind in England”, said Lancaster, referring to the introduction of planning rules that brought the nascent onshore wind industry to a juddering halt.

He said rolling out solar power in line with the net zero goal would take up less than 1% of the UK’s agricultural land, which would have “relatively insignificant” impacts on food security compared with other non-food uses, such as bioenergy crops.

What was lacking was “a helicopter view from the centre of government over what we use land for” that could minimise conflicts and trade-offs, he added. The government has repeatedly delayed the publication of a land use framework for the UK.

Nick Eyre, a professor of energy and climate policy at Oxford University, said solar on rooftop and brownfield sites must be deployed at greater speed but it would not be sufficient for the UK to secure the solar power it needed to meet decarbonisation goals.

By 2050, Oxfordshire alone would need the equivalent of four or five Botley Wests in solar capacity under a progressive scenario, he said. “We should have had a plan for where solar was going to get built in the county and work from there. But if we want to build solar quickly then this is probably the sort of project that needs to go ahead.”

The German developer Photovolt Development Partners (PVDP) says the 840MW Botley West proposal could power 330,000 homes and has been designed to reduce the visual impact on the landscape, increase biodiversity and allow sheep to graze the land.

Solar farms this big are designated as nationally significant infrastructure projects and are examined by the Planning Inspectorate, with the secretary of state making the final decision, which will fall to the next government. PVDP expects to submit a planning application in September and hopes to start generating power in 2027.

Alex Rogers, a professor at the University of Oxford who specialises in marine ecology, and who chairs the Stop Botley West campaign, rejects accusations that the group is made up of an old guard of anti-solar nimbys. “I see the impacts of climate change everywhere we go in the ocean. There is absolutely no doubt that we are in a climate emergency,” he said. The problem, he said, was a vacuum in national policies, which had led to a “solar gold rush”.

However, some of the campaign’s arguments are seemingly based on more spurious claims. In what it describes as “uncomfortable truths”, Stop Botley West says solar farms are “inefficient” and the scheme “may never pay back its carbon debt”. A local election leaflet from a Conservative candidate and member of the campaign falsely claimed that the project’s carbon footprint “will be greater than the benefits”.

Eyre described the claim that solar farms are inefficient as “misleading” and the idea that it would not repay the carbon debt as “simply wrong”.

The International Energy Agency says solar panels need to operate for only four to eight months to offset their manufacturing emissions, and studies have shown that emissions savings from avoiding fossil fuels trump the technology’s carbon footprint. While wind power is more efficient than solar, a recent Royal Society report found solar power was a necessary part of the mix.

Claims solar farms are inefficient and “not environmentally friendly” are also being promoted by the UK Solar Alliance, a coalition of 124 groups opposing about 9GW worth of large-scale solar plans, as part of a toolkit of resources for local campaigns. The document was compiled by the alliance’s former chair Michael Alder, who recently joined the academic advisory council of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), the UK’s most prominent climate sceptic thinktank, which has repeatedly attacked renewable energy and net zero policies.

The Stop Botley West campaign and the UK Solar Alliance say they strongly reject climate denial views. Alder told the Guardian he was “not a climate change denier” but had accepted a GWPF invitation to “give independent views on academic papers”.

For Hilary Brown, the chair of Sustainable Woodstock, the Stop Botley West campaign has distracted from needed discussions about how to improve the proposal so it benefits local people and nature if approved.

Despite the vocal opposition, ECIU polling found that in the south-east of England 70% of respondents would support a solar farm being built in their local area. Lilah McKim, 22, a local climate activist, said the project gave her hope at a time when the world urgently needed climate action.