Orbital by Samantha Harvey, the only British writer shortlisted this year, has won the 2024 Booker prize, the UK’s most prestigious prize for fiction.

Harvey’s tale of six fictional astronauts on the International Space Station was “unanimously” chosen as the winner after a “proper day” considering the six-strong shortlist, according to judging chair, the artist and author Edmund de Waal. “Our unanimity about Orbital recognises its beauty and ambition. It reflects Harvey’s extraordinary intensity of attention to the precious and precarious world we share”.

“I was not expecting that,” said Harvey in her acceptance speech. “We were told that we weren’t allowed to swear in our speech, so there goes my speech. It was just one swear word 150 times.”

She went on to dedicate her win to those who “speak for and not against the Earth, for and not against the dignity of other humans, other life, and all the people who speak for, and call for, and work for peace”.

Orbital, which was published last November and is now available in paperback, was the highest-selling book of the shortlist in the run-up to the winner announcement, with 29,000 copies sold in the UK this year. The book, which follows its characters over the course of a day as they experience 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets, is a “finely crafted meditation on the Earth, beauty and human aspiration”, wrote Alexandra Harris in her Guardian review.

At 136 pages long, Orbital is the second-shortest book to win the prize in its history; it is four pages longer than Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald, which won in 1979. Asked whether the panel’s choice is a vote in favour of short books, De Waal said “absolutely not”, adding that Orbital is “the right length of book for what it’s trying to achieve”.

Harvey said that she nearly gave up on writing Orbital because she thought: “Why on earth would anybody want to hear from a woman at her desk in Wiltshire writing about space, imagining what it’s like being in space, when people have actually been there? I lost my nerve with it, I thought, I don’t have the authority to write this book.” She said that Tim Peake, an astronaut, has read the book, and was “very nice about it”. He “wanted to know where I’d got my intel”, she said.

Orbital was bookmaker William Hill’s joint favourite to win, along with Percival Everett’s James, a reimagining of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of the enslaved Jim. James was the favourite at Ladbrokes, and critics agreed that Everett was most likely to take home the prize. With Everett being the only man on the shortlist, this year marked the first time that five women were shortlisted in the prize’s 55-year history. Taking home the £50,000 prize on Tuesday evening, Harvey has become the first woman to win the award in five years. Asked what she would spend the prize money on, Harvey said that she needs a new bike and would like to visit Japan.

Harvey was previously longlisted for the Booker prize in 2009 for her debut novel, The Wilderness. Orbital is her fifth, following All Is Song, Dear Thief and The Western Wind. She has also written a memoir on insomnia, The Shapeless Unease, which was published in 2020.

Shortlisted with Harvey and Everett were Rachel Kushner for Creation Lake, Anne Michaels for Held, Yael van der Wouden for The Safekeep and Charlotte Wood for Stone Yard Devotional.

Alongside De Waal on this year’s judging panel were novelists Sara Collins and Yiyun Li, Guardian fiction editor Justine Jordan, and musician Nitin Sawhney. “As judges we were determined to find a book that moved us, a book that had capaciousness and resonance, that we are compelled to share,” said De Waal. “We wanted everything.”

“Orbital is our book,” he added. “Everyone and no one is the subject, as six astronauts in the International Space Station circle the Earth observing the passages of weather across the fragility of borders and time zones. With her language of lyricism and acuity, Harvey makes our world strange and new for us.”

The winner was chosen from 156 books published between 1 October 2023 and 30 September 2024. To be eligible, books had to have been written originally in English by an author of any nationality, and published in the UK or Ireland. Before 2014, only books by writers from the Commonwealth, Ireland and Zimbabwe were eligible.

One of last year’s judges, the comedian Robert Webb, called the task of reading every submitted book “impossible”, adding that “you finish as many as you can and the other ones you put to one side after a respectable but undisclosed fraction has been read.” However, De Waal said this year’s judges “read every single one fully”.

Last year, Irish writer Paul Lynch took home the award for his dystopian novel Prophet Song. Other recent winners include Shehan Karunatilaka, Damon Galgut and Douglas Stuart. The last time a woman was announced as winner was in 2019, when Bernardine Evaristo and Margaret Atwood were named joint winners.

This year has been “a masterclass in human destruction”, the UN secretary general has said as he reflected on extreme weather and record temperatures around the world fuelled by climate breakdown.

António Guterres painted a stark portrait of the consequences of climate breakdown that had arisen in recent months. “Families running for their lives before the next hurricane strikes; workers and pilgrims collapsing in insufferable heat; floods tearing through communities and tearing down infrastructure; children going to bed hungry as droughts ravage crops,” he said. “All these disasters, and more, are being supercharged by human-made climate change.”

Guterres was addressing scores of world leaders and high-ranking government officials from nearly 200 countries gathered in Azerbaijan for the Cop29 UN climate summit. Over a fortnight of talks, nations will try to find ways to raise the vast sums of money needed to tackle the climate crisis.

Developing countries want guarantees of $1tn a year in funds by 2035 to help them cut greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to the impacts of extreme weather.

The talks have been overshadowed by the re-election of Donald Trump, an avowed climate denier, to the US presidency. Although leaders including the UK’s Keir Starmer, Barbados’s Mia Mottley and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan addressed the summit, the heads of government of most of the world’s biggest economies stayed away.

Starmer confirmed stringent new plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions, as revealed by the Guardian, which were praised by campaigners and experts. The UK is one of the first leading economies to present such a plan, months ahead of a UN deadline of next February.

The cut, of 81% by 2035 compared with 1990 levels, will be partly met by decarbonising the electricity sector, but the government is also likely to have to add new policies to encourage public transport and walking, and a switch from gas heating to electric heat pumps.

Starmer told journalists at Cop29 that this need not involve drastic changes to people’s lifestyles, though the Climate Change Committee, which advises the government, had previously recommended a 25% cut in meat and dairy consumption by 2030 and a 35% cut in meat consumption by 2050.

Rebecca Newsom, a senior policy adviser at Greenpeace International, said: “Starmer’s commitment to a relatively ambitious new target for cutting emissions will inject new momentum into the talks and he is right to highlight the huge opportunity offered by the green transition to cut bills, unlock investment and create jobs across the UK. But much clearer plans are still needed – particularly more investment for those working in offshore oil and gas to transition to renewable energy.”

Governments were told at Cop they must take concerted action on reducing greenhouse gases or face economic disaster that could threaten them electorally.

Simon Stiell, the UN’s top climate official, said politics, economics and the climate were now fatally entwined. Governments may be feeling the consequences of the worst inflation for decades but far more serious consequences were in store.

“Worsening climate impacts will put inflation on steroids,” Stiell said, tuning in to some of the economic fears that have helped deliver a series of electoral victories to rightwing parties around the world in the past year.

“The climate crisis is a cost-of-living crisis, because climate disasters are driving up costs for households and businesses. Climate finance is global inflation insurance.”

Rather than being an issue of protecting future generations, tackling greenhouse gas emissions was the only way to save the global economy in the short as well as the long term, Stiell said. “There has been a seismic shift in the global climate crisis. Because the climate crisis is fast becoming an economy killer – right now, today, in this political cycle,” he said.

Ilham Aliyev, the president of the Cop’s host nation, Azerbaijan, struck a different note. Azerbaijan has been a sizeable producer of oil and gas since the mid-19th century. Fossil fuels make up 90% of the country’s export income, and the infrastructure of oil and gas extraction is everywhere in evidence around the capital, Baku: a flaring refinery lights up the city’s night-time skyline, oil wells dot the suburbs, and tankers lumber across the Caspian Sea to its port. Even the country’s national symbol is a flame.

Aliyev, whose family is thought to have made billions from the country’s natural assets, called Azerbaijan’s oil and gas “a gift from God” and made clear the extraction would continue.

“As president of Cop29, of course we will be a strong advocate for green transition, and we are doing it,” he told the event. “But at the same time, we must be realistic.”

He attacked critics of the country – an autocratic state that has been found in NGO assessments to be one of the world’s most corrupt – and defended its use of its resources. “Countries should not be blamed [for having oil and gas deposits] and should not be blamed for bringing these resources to the market, because the market needs them. The people need them,” he said.

His words contrasted with pleas from dozens of developing country leaders for urgent action to stem the rising tide of CO₂ emissions and rescue them from the consequences.

Hilda Heine, the president of the Republic of the Marshall Islands, a tiny, low-lying atoll group in the Pacific that is threatened with inundation if temperatures rise much higher, criticised rich countries for telling the poor they must cut greenhouse gas emissions while failing to provide access to the finance that would enable that.

“It is in our blood to know when a tide is turning,” she said. “And on climate, the tide is turning today.”

On Monday the talks had got off to a slow start when officials tried to clear up some technical issues before the leaders arrived on Tuesday. A resolution on the trade of carbon offsets was passed, to the relief of the hosts, but this was criticised by some civil society groups who said it was flawed and had been rushed through.

The talks will continue on Wednesday when more world leaders including Giorgia Meloni of Italy and Shehbaz Sharif of Pakistan will give addresses.

Late-night hosts talk Donald Trump’s re-election as president, Democratic infighting and a promotion mishap for the new Wicked movie.

The Daily Show

In his first monologue since Donald Trump won both the electoral college and the popular vote in the US presidential election, Jon Stewart returned to The Daily Show shellshocked. “It turns out the election was stolen by more people voting for Donald Trump,” he joked. “It’s quite a caper.

“It’s a delight to hear about why it happened from so many people who were so wrong about what was going to happen,” he added, referring to the rampant blame game among Democrats, as evidenced by several clips of pundits blaming the “far left”.

“I only have one problem with the woke theory,” Stewart said. “I just didn’t recall seeing any Democrats running on woke shit.

“And don’t forget about Kamala Harris. It’s not like she was exactly waving around her NPR tote bag,” Stewart said ahead of a clip of the vice-president saying: “I have a Glock.”

“They acted like Republicans for the last four months,” Stewart bemoaned. “They wore camo hats and went to Cheney family reunions. Do you know how dangerous it is to wear a hunting hat around Cheney?!

“Democrats were mostly running against an identity that was defined for them based on a couple of months of post-George Floyd, defund-the-police Instagram posts from four years ago,” he continued. “What happened was the country felt like government wasn’t working for them, and that the Democrats in particular were taking their hard-earned money and giving it to people who didn’t deserve it as much as them. So the Democrats got shellacked.

“I’m sure any robust examination of better policies is very welcome. But I just want to please assure people: this isn’t forever,” he concluded. “This is not the end. We have to regroup, and we have to continue to fight and continue to work day in and day out to create a better society for our children, for this world, for this country, that we know is possible. It’s possible.”

Seth Meyers

On Late Night, Seth Meyers looked into how “Democrats are doing what they do best: turning on each other”.

Many liberal politicians have expressed their opinion on what went wrong this election. Bernie Sanders, for one, said it was “no great surprise that a Democratic party which has abandoned working-class people would find that the working class has abandoned them”.

“Bernie’s argument basically boils down to this: voters want someone who has the vibe of an outsider, who can direct the voters’ anger against powerful people like billionaires and political elites,” said Meyers. “Otherwise, a racist demagogue will come along and fill the void by scapegoating vulnerable groups like migrants, which is exactly what Trump did.”

Meyers noted that Harris “did campaign on many pro-worker policies like raising the minimum wage, making it easier to unionize or taking on corporate price gouging. But now some Democrats are saying those policies may have been overshadowed by the decision to elevate Republicans like Liz Cheney and Dick Cheney.”

And some Democrats, such as the New York congressman Tom Suozzi, claim that the party is too beholden to the “far left” and have begun supporting Republican transphobic talking points.

“To anyone suggesting Democrats could win elections by throwing trans people under the bus, let me just say: fuck off,” said Meyers. “If you’re choosing this moment to scapegoat and demonize vulnerable people rather than aim your criticism at the powerful elites and moneyed interests who paved the way for the return of Trump and stand to benefit from his second term, you’re way off.”

Stephen Colbert

On The Late Show, Stephen Colbert opened with a humorous story, as Wicked-themed dolls from Mattel are being pulled from stores after the company mistakenly listed a porn site on the packaging for the movie souvenir. Instead of printing the website for the movie, WickedMovie.com, the packages cited a different website with more than 6,000 scenes of “wicked” porn.

Anyone who clicked on the offending link was directed to a page requiring users to be 18 years or older; those that clicked enter landed on a promotion page for the porn movie titled Kenzie Loves Girls 2. “I’m sure you have a lot of questions, but I’ll just tell you right off: no, you do not have to have seen Kenzie Loves Girls 1 to understand the plot of Kenzie Loves Girls 2,” Colbert joked.

Mattel issued a press release apologizing for the “unfortunate error” and promised “immediate action to remedy this”.

“Adding ‘for a handy link to our full press release, please go to handyfullrelease.com. And we did it again, didn’t we?’” Colbert joked.

In political news, Trump announced his new chief of staff, Susie Wiles, who was also his 2024 campaign manager. “So she was the one who put Trump in a garbageman costume and had him dance to Ave Maria, and it worked, and I don’t know what anything means anymore,” said Colbert.

Wiles “may not be the worst choice for this job – and not just because the worst choice was elected president”, Colbert added, because during the campaign, Wiles reportedly worked to keep particularly divisive and fringe conservative figures out of Trump’s orbit. “For instance, she lured Rudy Giuliani away from Trump using a bottle of cabernet dressed up as a sexy lady,” he joked.

Jimmy Kimmel

And in Los Angeles, Jimmy Kimmel looked ahead to the transition of power. According to the Presidential Transition Enhancement Act, the incoming president has to sign a pledge saying he will avoid conflicts of interest and other ethical concerns while he’s in office. “Which is hilarious,” said Kimmel. “It’s like asking a bear to sign something promising to protect the salmon.”

Trump’s team has missed multiple deadlines to sign this, dating back to September. “Of course, he’s being difficult about signing an ethics pledge because he’s not going to behave ethically,” said Kimmel. “This is the White House version of Charlie Brown trying to kick the football. The same thing happens over and over again.”

Trump actually signed the act into law, “so he’s breaking his own law, which is a bucket list item for sure”, said Kimmel.

Trump and his team still say they intend to sign the pledge, but Kimmel was skeptical. “Come on – we still haven’t seen his tax returns,” he said. “We’ve heard his penis described in excruciating detail, we still don’t know how many dependents he claims.”

The judge in Donald Trump’s Manhattan criminal hush-money case has postponed deciding on whether to throw out the president-elect’s conviction on presidential immunity grounds.

Judge Juan Merchan told Trump’s lawyers on Tuesday that he’d delay the ruling until 19 November after defense and prosecutors submitted a joint letter asking for a postponement.

The postponement followed numerous successful attempts to delay Trump’s case. Earlier this year, he was convicted on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in a scheme to influence the 2016 election.

The verdict came on 31 May – following fewer than 12 hours of jury deliberations in the unprecedented first criminal trial of a US president, former or sitting. The outcome marked a potentially stunning blow to Trump, then the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.

The campaign for Joe Biden, who ultimately withdrew his re-election bid, said “no one is above the law” in an email blast shortly after the verdict.

“In New York today, we saw that no one is above the law. Donald Trump has always mistakenly believed he would never face consequences for breaking the law for his own personal gain,” Michael Tyler, Biden’s communications director, said.

Trump’s criminal case portrayed a man who did not seem befitting of the presidency. Prosecutors said that Trump falsely recorded reimbursements he made to then lawyer Michael Cohen for a $130,000 payoff to adult film star Stormy Daniels, to silence her about an alleged affair with Trump, as “legal expenses”.

Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg’s office said that these falsifications were made to hide Trump’s violation of New York state election law, which criminalizes promoting the election of any person to office through illegal means.

Prosecutors said those unlawful means were the $130,000 payout to Daniels. The payout was, in essence, an illicit campaign contribution, as it was carried out for the benefit of Trump’s 2016 bid – exceeding the $2,700 individual contribution cap.

But Trump, whose poll numbers remained steady throughout the trial, did not lose support. He ultimately became the Republican nominee and, on 5 November, bested Kamala Harris.

Trump was originally scheduled to be sentenced on 10 July. Then came the 1 July US supreme court ruling that granted sitting presidents broad immunity for official acts taken during their time in office.

Trump urged Merchan to delay his sentencing in light of this ruling. His legal team pushed to challenge Trump’s conviction, citing the supreme court decision.

Merchan agreed to mull over the legalities and pushed back the proceeding until 18 September “if such is still necessary” given the supreme court decision. Trump’s attorneys in August asked for still more time, saying that they would need it to possibly appeal Merchan’s decision.

Merchan on 6 September delayed Trump’s sentencing yet again until 26 November – after the election – saying the situation was “fraught with complexities”. He said this decision was meant “to avoid any appearance – however unwarranted – that the proceeding has been affected by or seeks to affect the approaching presidential election in which the defendant is a candidate”.

Trump’s lawyers argued over the weekend that there are “strong reasons for the requested stay, and eventually dismissal of the case in the interests of justice”, according to the aforementioned letter.

Trump’s election victory has derailed his other criminal cases. Special prosecutor Jack Smith is winding down the federal election interference and classified documents cases against Trump.

The state-level election case in Fulton county, Georgia, is on hold pending appeal, following revelations that district attorney Fani Willis had hired as a prosecutor a man with whom she had an affair. Even if the proceeding survived appeal, proceedings are all but guaranteed to languish until 2029.

More details soon …

A friend recently asked: “Do you think the United States will survive the anger of white men?” As blunt as the question is, the core element is not so far-fetched. In fact, the majority of white men (and women) who voted in the presidential election in 2024 have rallied around a man who has called for the “termination of the constitution”, vowed to be a “dictator”, and threatened to deploy the US military against Americans. They support a man who is a convicted felon, an adjudicated rapist, a proven liar, who has been fined nearly half a billion dollars for fraud, who incited an insurrection that injured 140 police officers, and who mismanaged the Covid-19 pandemic causing hundreds of thousands to die needlessly.

The fact that Donald Trump’s candidacy was even viable, given that horrific track record, was because of the support of white men. White men, whose anger was on full display at Madison Square Garden as they spewed racist, misogynistic venom. White men who attacked poll workers and also voters of Kamala Harris. White men who chafed at the thought that their wives and girlfriends would not vote for the man who thought it was “a beautiful thing” that reproductive rights had been destroyed. And, as the New York Times reported, the downwardly mobile, frustrated “white men without a degree, [who] have been surpassed in income by college-educated women”.

And let’s be clear. Trump has laid out an agenda that will provide the “wages of whiteness” to his male supporters but very little else. The racist hate that undergirds Maga can only provide threadbare comfort. The planned enormous tariffs, the rollback on workplace, food and environmental safety regulations, the dismantling of labor protections, the planned deportation of tens of millions of undocumented people and naturalized citizens, the assault on reproductive rights and alignment with dictators – all of this will destroy the economy, explode the deficit and leave the United States severely isolated and weakened.

This is nothing new. White male anger, especially at the nation’s inclusion of African Americans, has repeatedly privileged white supremacy over the viability of the United States. During the war of independence, when the nation was fighting to become the United States, South Carolina’s government fumed at Congress’s request to arm the enslaved and give them their freedom in exchange for fending off a British force that was more than 10 times the size of what those in Charleston could muster. Government officials flat out refused and barked that they weren’t sure that the US “was a nation worth fighting for” and would rather take their chances with the king of England. In short, enslaving those of African descent was infinitely more important than the United States.

Later on, during the subsequent battles over drafting the constitution, far too many white slaveholding men were willing to hold the United States hostage unless they got their way. That meant reinforcing slavery and the power of slaveholders, despite the document’s language about “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”. They threatened. They raged. They schemed. And they succeeded.

The three-fifths clause, which partially counted each enslaved human being by that fraction, gave the slaveholding south disproportionate and unearned power in the US House of Representatives. The Fugitive Slave Clause allowed them to hunt down beyond their state borders those seeking that elusive freedom from bondage. The additional 20 years of the Atlantic Slave Trade meant they could secure more human cargo directly from Africa to engorge the coffers of those placing racialized slavery above democracy.

The disastrous contradictions embedded in the founding of the United States could not help but erupt into civil war. Once again, a group of white men were angry. Angry that the country had elected a man who did not want to see slavery spread beyond the South. Angry that Abraham Lincoln’s position meant a diminution of the south’s national political power. Angry that Lincoln was a Republican, a party founded on anti-slavery. So, in cold, calculated anger they attacked the United States of America. They set out to destroy it.

They did not succeed. But that war sowed the dragon’s teeth that undermined the promise of a true multi-racial democracy and led to the horrors of Jim Crow. When the need for correcting the US’s decidedly unequal democracy ran headlong into the threat of nuclear annihilation during the cold war, the choice should have been obvious. But, once again, white men’s anger put the United States in jeopardy.

In 1957, the Soviets launched Sputnik, a satellite, which proved that the USSR unexpectedly had the capabilities to launch its nuclear arsenal across the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. The US was no longer safe. President Dwight Eisenhower responded by proposing the National Defense Education Act, which would pump hundreds of millions of dollars into universities so the US would have the “brainpower to fight the cold war”.

The bill was shepherded through Congress by two Alabama legislators, the representative Carl Elliott and the senator J Lister Hill. Both wanted the money but neither wanted what came with it. In other words, they wanted to continue to deny admission to African Americans to their racially exclusive universities, such as Ole Miss, LSU, the University of Georgia and the University of Alabama. If this was about educating those who could give the US an edge in the cold war, then limiting that access by race was folly.

Yet Elliott and Hill, both signatories to the virtually insurrectionist Southern Manifesto, which vowed to use every weapon at the congressional membership’s disposal to stop Brown v Board of Education from darkening their states’ doorsteps, refused to move the bill forward. They demanded, instead, that Eisenhower provide assurances that those hundreds of millions of dollars would be as whites-only as their universities. Faced with the dilemma of Jim Crow or possible nuclear annihilation, the angry white men chose to protect Jim Crow, not the United States.

Similarly, today, despite the warnings from generals who served with Trump, police officers who endured the attacks on January 6, and a God-fearing then vice-president Mike Pence who was targeted for a hanging with gallows constructed during the insurrection, the angry white men who propped up Trump’s return to the White House ignored everything they say they valued – the military, law enforcement and God – to give into the rage of white grievance, the “pastiche of sweaty anger” that the Trump-Vance campaign peddled, and to the fear and violence embedded in the “great replacement” theory.

Once again, unfortunately, the anger about a multi-racial democracy has put the viability of the United States in jeopardy.

Shell has won its appeal against a landmark climate judgment by a Dutch court, which in 2021 ordered the fossil fuel company to sharply reduce its greenhouse gas emissions.

A court of appeal ruled on Tuesday that, while Shell does have a “special responsibility” to cut its emissions as a big oil company, this would not be achieved by imposing a specific legal goal.

Shell had appealed against a lower court ruling in 2021 that it must cut its global carbon emissions by 45% by the end of 2030 compared with 2019 levels. It was the first such ruling against a company in the world.

Shell’s chief executive, Wael Sawan, welcomed the appeal decision, saying it was “the right one for the global energy transition, the Netherlands and our company”.

The case was brought by Milieudefensie, the Dutch arm of Friends of the Earth, and more than 17,000 co-plaintiffs.

“This hurts,” said the director of Milieudefensie, Donald Pols. “At the same time, we see that this case has ensured that major polluters are not immune and has further fuelled the debate about their responsibility in combating dangerous climate change. That is why we will continue to tackle major polluters, such as Shell.”

Shell was originally told it must slash emissions within its own operations, as well as those of its suppliers and buyers, in line with the Paris climate agreement.

During its appeal, Shell argued in court that corporate emissions were a matter for politicians, not the judiciary, and that any fossil fuels it chose not to extract would simply be exploited by another company.

The appeals court said Milieudefensie had the right to bring such a claim even though political choices must be made to combat dangerous climate change.

But it was not convinced that a reduction obligation imposed on a specific company would have the effect of limiting emissions from its customers, “especially if this reduction obligation can also be realised by selling less fossil fuels”.

Milieudefensie had accused Shell of failing to comply with the initial court ruling, which explicitly said the company should begin to act on the judgment immediately regardless of any appeal.

The NGO gave evidence to the court that, despite increasing its volume of renewables, Shell was also planning to develop hundreds of new oil and gas fields despite the International Energy Agency warning against investments in any new fossil fuel extraction.

The court said it was “reasonable to expect oil and gas companies to take into account the negative consequences of a further expansion of the supply of fossil fuels for the energy transition also when investing in the production of fossil fuels. Shell’s planned investments in new oil and gas fields may be at odds with this.”

However, it said this was not relevant to whether a specific reduction obligation should be imposed on the company.

Sawan said Shell still planned to halve emissions from its operations by 2030, adding: “We are making good progress in our strategy to deliver more value with less emissions.”

The court did uphold the statement that companies such as Shell had obligations to protect human rights.

The judgment can still be appealed against and taken to the supreme court. However, this would focus on interpretation of the law and not the key facts of the case.

Sjoukje van Oosterhout, head of research at Milieudefensie, said the NGO would read the full ruling carefully before deciding whether to appeal. But she said she believes there is still room for future legal action against corporations.

While this appeal was taking place, other domestic courts issued important rulings on assessment of greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel projects. In January 2024, Norway blocked the development of three North Sea oil and gas fields on the grounds that the state did not properly assess the impact of future use on climate breakdown. The UK supreme court issued a similar ruling several months later.

At a seaside restaurant near the docks in Fredrikstad, Norway, there’s a selection of delicious looking entrees sitting in front of me. There is a cheesy lasagne, a savoury Mexican casserole, and a spicy chilli con carne. Biting in to each one in turn, I savour the familiar taste of ground beef. Or is it?

The dishes come from Pronofa Asa, a Scandinavian company whose purpose is to make new and sustainable protein sources. In 2022, it acquired the Swedish research company Marine Taste and expanded on its work turning ciona – or “sea squirts” to you and me – into mincemeat. The dishes in Fredrikstad were prototypes, but Pronofa plans to have its mincemeat on supermarket shelves in Norway and Sweden before the end of the year, it says, and will aim to expand throughout Europe in the coming years.

Ciona is naturally rich in proteins, and can be used as an alternative feed for fish or animals as well as people.

“The sea squirt is the only organism that produces 100% pure cellulose,” says Hans Petter Olsen, the CEO of Pronofa. “So there are some fibres in the meat and we had to work on how to process them so the mouthfeel would be similar to meat.”

Pronofa, and a number of companies like it, are developing alternative protein sources for kitchen tables around the world, which have a minimal carbon footprint but that taste like family favourites. The Food Standards Agency said in October that cell-cultivated meat could be on sale in the UK within a few years. Cultivated chicken was approved for sale to consumers in Singapore in 2020 and in the US in 2023 and cultivated steak was approved in Israel in 2024. Scores of companies around the world are developing similar products, including using pork and fish.

Ciona are umami flavoured, but naturally have a slight seafood taste and a texture reminiscent of calamari. There are no additives – this transformation to “fake meat” is accomplished simply by the way that the company processes the sea squirt, says Olsen.

Changing the sea squirt into something that looks enticing is important as ciona does not look appetising. Burping and bubbling in the freezing waters of the North Sea, sea squirts are translucent tubes that resemble gelatinous sacs. They will grow on almost any solid surface in the sea, from rocks and driftwood to deliberately placed ropes.

They have two siphons on the top of their tubular bodies: one for pulling in nutrient-rich sea water, the other for expelling filtered water.

Yet, once processed, ciona can be consumed in surprisingly traditional recipes. “We had to work on how to eliminate the marine taste,” says Olsen. “Because it should not taste marine or fish-like at all. It is going to taste like meat.”

But sea squirts are more than just another alternative protein source. Farming ciona is “super-sustainable”, according to Olsen, in part because they require almost no input from the farmer. Ropes are seeded with ciona larvae, similar to farming oysters or mussels. The farmer’s labour is required at harvest time, when the long ropes covered in sea squirts are hauled from the ocean, the ciona removed, and then processed.

Often considered a highly invasive species, varieties of tunicates (of which ciona are just one) appear uninvited on ropes, buoys, bowlines and docks around the world. Most have potential for culinary uses, but Pronofa’s recipes are specially formulated for the ciona that thrive in the North Sea. In spite of being an invasive species, ciona and other tunicates can be of tremendous value to the environments they grow in, filtering out nitrogen from the ocean waters.

“One of the side effects of agriculture is the nitrogen surplus,” says Olsen, “Surplus that is running into the rivers and causing the algae to grow too much. But if you drive close to one of our tunicate farms, the ocean will be like the Mediterranean – crystal clear waters, and visibility of 30 metres.”

However, sea squirt farming is not without its difficulties. A venture to farm the variety haloceynthia roretzi, or sea pineapple, for human consumption in Korea has struggled to have any impact due to continued events of mass mortality. Scientists in Korea believe the die-offs are caused by a parasite whose destructive capabilities may be increased by the monoculture nature of tunicate farms.

Nevertheless, Pronofa hopes that its work with the invertebrates will turn it into a food staple rather than just another fashionable and short-lived meat alternative.

“For us, it is very important not to be put on the same shelf as Beyond Meat and all those other meat replacements,” says Olsen. “Eventually, we want to compete on scale with the salmon industry in Norway, and we want to deliver millions of tonnes of our products.” The Norwegian salmon industry makes up 2% of Norway’s GDP and is worth more than $10bn (£7.7bn) annually, according to the Norwegian Seafood Council.

Olsen’s bold vision starts with a plate of convincingly meat-like ciona mince, drenched in tomato sauce, cheese and sandwiched between sheets of pasta. It looks like meat, and one forkful confirms, it tastes like meat. Ciona mincemeat could be the next ground beef – without the environmentally destructive processes associated with cattle farming. But for now, it’s a case of watch this space.

Social media platform Bluesky has picked up more than 700,000 new users in the week since the US election, as users seek to escape misinformation and offensive posts on X.

The influx, largely from North America and the UK, has helped Bluesky reach 14.5 million users worldwide, up from 9 million in September, the company said.

Social media researcher Axel Bruns said the platform offered an alternative to X, formerly Twitter, including a more effective system for blocking or suspending problematic accounts and policing harmful behaviour.

“It’s become a refuge for people who want to have the kind of social media experience that Twitter used to provide, but without all the far-right activism, the misinformation, the hate speech, the bots and everything else,” he said.

“The more liberal kind of Twitter community has really now escaped from there and seems to have moved en masse to Bluesky.”

Bluesky began as a project inside Twitter but became an independent company in 2022, and is now primarily owned by chief executive Jay Graber.

The platform has previously benefited from dissatisfaction with X and its billionaire owner, Elon Musk, who is closely tied to US president-elect Donald Trump’s successful election campaign. Twitter shed millions of users after rebranding to X and usage in the US slumped by more than a fifth in the subsequent seven months.

Bluesky reported picking up 3 million new users in the week after X was suspended in Brazil in September and a further 1.2 million in the two days after X announced it would allow users to view posts from people who had blocked them.

“We’re excited to welcome all of these new people, ranging from Swifties to wrestlers to city planners,” Bluesky spokesperson Emily Liu said.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian and professor at New York University, had 250,000 followers on X but picked up 21,000 followers in her first day on Bluesky this week.

“I am still on X but after January, when X could be owned by a de facto member of the Trump administration, its functions as a Trump propaganda outlet and far-right radicalization machine could be accelerated,” she said.

Bluesky is still second to Threads in the social networking category on Apple’s US App Store, which reported reaching 275 million monthly active users in November, up from 200 million in August.

The independent platform has recently added features including direct messaging and video compatibility to more closely resemble X and distinguish itself from its Meta-owned competitor.

Ben-Ghiat has found the site’s “starter packs”, or groups of people with similar expertise and interest, a refreshing way in.

“[They] promise to give Bluesky some of what I valued on Twitter/X: informed takes on a subject from multiple points of view,” she said.

Bruns, a professor at Queensland University of Technology’s Digital Media Research Center, said the explosion in user numbers had created “growing pains” as new users learned to navigate the site but was ultimately adding to the site’s momentum.

“It really feels like a throwback to those days of the early excitement about social media in many ways, and that’s what, at the moment, attracts quite a few people,” he said. “It just makes it more vibrant, more active place.”

On Monday night, New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez posted that she was “back” on Bluesky, saying “Good GOD it’s nice to be in a digital space with other real human beings.” Her post was liked by 27,000 people.