A few years ago, Anna von Rebay gave up her lucrative job in a corporate law firm specialising in art law to concentrate on her passion for the ocean. “All threats to the sea come from humans, who behave as though nature is nothing more than a resource,” says Von Rebay, who works in Germany and Indonesia. “But the ocean can’t stand up for itself.”

Inspired by a rising wave of lawsuits seeking to hold governments and companies to account for climate action, she set up Ocean Vision Legal, a law firm with a unique remit: to litigate on the ocean’s behalf.

“My aim was to motivate people, organisations and states to take legal action to enforce ocean protection,” she says.

She is not alone. Last year, the UN Environment Programme (Unep) said lawsuits challenging government and corporate inaction on the climate breakdown have become an important driver of change. There have been more than 2,500 lawsuits relating to the climate crisis around the world – and many relate to the ocean.

In January, Von Rebay’s firm initiated preliminary proceedings against Germany on behalf of Bund, a German conservation NGO, for issuing fishing licences that allow bottom trawling, a destructive fishing practice, in a marine protected area (MPA) of the Dogger Bank.

One of the largest sandbanks in the North Sea, and home to porpoises and seals, the Dogger Bank is a protected area under the EU habitats directive. There was no environmental impact assessment carried out before permits were issued, Bund alleges.

“We think this is illegal and now the ministry is looking at our objection,” says Von Rebay.

If the case proceeds, it could set a precedent, with implications for other European countries’ licences if they allow bottom trawling in areas protected under the directive. Two NGOs, Bloom and ClientEarth, have already threatened France with legal action over allowing bottom trawling in MPAs in the Mediterranean.

Von Rebay, a surfer, is proactive on the ocean’s behalf. Since Iceland decided to resume whaling last month, she is working on a letter to the Human Rights Council, a UN body, warning that NGOs and others consider allowing whaling to be a potential infringement of the right to a healthy environment.

This month, her firm will launch a collective movement of NGOs and intergovernmental bodies calling for a universal declaration of ocean rights, similar to the rights of nature. It is also looking into the legal implications of deep-sea mining.

Von Rebay, however, is not the only lawyer exploring litigation as a tool against an industry as yet in its infancy but which could pose one of the greatest threats to the oceans. One of the world’s biggest environmental groups, the WWF, announced in May that it is suing the Norwegian government for opening up its seabed for deep-sea mining, claiming that Norway has failed to properly investigate the consequences of such activity.

And there have been other notable successes on behalf of the world’s seas. Perhaps the most significant came in May, when nine small island states won a historic climate case, which ruled that all signatories to a treaty known as the United Nations convention on the law of the sea (Unclos), must do more to protect the oceans from the impacts of global heating.

Together, as the Commission of Small Island States on Climate Change and International Law (Cosis), they had asked the court, the international tribunal on the law of the sea (Itlos), to clarify what was considered marine pollution under the convention.

The opinion found that signatories’ responsibilities to protect the sea extended to greenhouse gas emissions. While it is not legally binding, experts believe the opinion will have a significant impact on how courts rule on such issues in the future.

Payam Akhavan, legal counsel for Cosis, says Itlos has taken a “critical first step” in recognising that what small island nations have been fighting for at annual Cop climate negotiations for decades, is already part of international law.

“The major polluters must prevent catastrophic harm to small island nations, and if they fail to do so, they must compensate for loss and damage,” he says.

Isabela Keuschnigg, a legal officer at Opportunity Green, a non-profit organisation using law to solve climate issues, echoes the view that Itlos will “boost climate lawsuits”.

“There have already been successful challenges which have centred around vulnerable communities that are dependent on the ocean,” she says. She cites the case of the Torres Strait Islanders, a group of eight inhabitants of the low-lying islands threatened by sea level rise, off Queensland, Australia. In 2019, they submitted a complaint to the UN human rights council over Australia’s insufficient climate action. In September 2022, the UNHCR found in favour of the islanders, in a historic win for Indigenous communities.

At Ocean Vision Legal, Von Rebay is confident that people are waking up to the idea of using the law to protect the environment. “There is growing awareness that there are marine protection obligations and we need to start using them,” she says. “This is the beginning.”

A US military pier, built two months ago as a way to bring sea-borne humanitarian aid into Gaza, is to be permanently dismantled within a few days, according to a new report.

The Associated Press (AP) reported that the pier, which has had to be moved repeatedly to avoid bad weather, would be reconnected to the Gaza coastline on Wednesday but would operate for just the next few days before being disassembled by the US army and navy.

The AP quoted unnamed officials as saying that the pier would be put back in place only long enough to move humanitarian supplies which have accumulated in Cyprus and on a floating dock offshore since the pier went out of action on 28 June as a result of weather conditions.

The chief Pentagon spokesperson, Maj Gen Pat Ryder, said on Tuesday that the pier was currently at the Israeli port of Ashdod, the haven used during bad weather, but added: “My understanding is that CENTCOM [US Central Command] intends to tentatively re-anchor the pier this week.”

Ryder did not comment on the longer term prospects for the pier. Aid workers familiar with the project had been predicting for weeks that the pier would not survive beyond July.

The pier scheme, first unveiled by Joe Biden in his State of the Union address in March, was always intended to be a temporary measure to complement the meagre amount of aid being allowed across land crossings by Israel, but US officials told Reuters in June it would last until August or September.

The eastern Mediterranean off the Gaza coast had been choppier in the summer months than had been expected with stormy weather making it necessary to move the pier in and out of position repeatedly.

Since it was first manoeuvred into position on 17 May, the pier has been operational for fewer than 20 days, and for most of those days, aid deliveries were simply unloaded on the beach without being distributed around Gaza because of security concerns.

The World Food Programme (WFP) suspended distribution convoys on 9 June, after the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) conducted a hostage rescue operation that saved four Israeli hostages but killed 274 Palestinians. Apart from a day’s operations to clear the backlog of humanitarian assistance on the beach, the WFP has continued to suspend its convoys pending a full security review.

Over its two months in operation, about 8,800 metric tons of aid has been unloaded off the pier, about 500 truckloads, equivalent to a single day of deliveries before the war began.

Critics of the scheme warned that the spectacular $230m project would divert attention from the international effort to pressure Israel to open the land crossings into Gaza, the most efficient means of delivering assistance to the 2.3 million Palestinians trapped in Gaza, more than a quarter of whom are in imminent danger of famine.

Land deliveries have dwindled dramatically since Israel launched an offensive on the southern border city of Rafah in May. According to UN figures, the number of trucks entering Gaza through two remaining open crossings, Keren Shalom and Erez West, fell from 840 in May, to 756 in June to only 18 so far in July.

The US Agency for International Development (USAID) referred questions about the pier’s future to the defence department but a spokesperson added: “What we continue to focus on is getting urgently needed aid to people in need across Gaza through all available mechanisms.”

“Ashdod port is open for humanitarian deliveries and we expect humanitarians will increasingly use this route,” the spokesperson said.

“Erez West and Kerem Shalom are also open, though insecurity and kinetic operations are constraining onward distributions within Gaza. The United States is actively involved in discussions with Israel, the UN, and other humanitarian organizations to determine ways to overcome these constraints and allow assistance to reach people in desperate need.”

Donald Trump returned to the campaign trail in Florida on Tuesday night, hurling insults at Joe Biden and airing a litany of familiar grievances, but declining to name a running mate for November’s general election.

The former president and presumptive Republican nominee was speaking to a crowd of several hundred supporters at his golf club in Doral, a western suburb of Miami, keeping them waiting in 90F heat for a freewheeling monologue that began more than an hour later than scheduled.

There was speculation that he might use his first public appearance since last month’s debate with the president to announce Florida senator Marco Rubio, who was present, as his vice-presidential pick, six days ahead of the Republican national convention (RNC) in Milwaukee.

Instead, Trump delivered a rambling 75-minute speech that included a succession of attacks on Biden and his faltering debate performance, which has raised questions among Democrats on whether the 81-year-old president was robust enough for a second term of office.

He seized on the post-debate turbulence that has prompted calls from some senior Democrats for Biden to step down and nominate Kamala Harris.

“The radical left Democratic party is divided in chaos, and having a full scale breakdown all because they can’t decide which of their candidates is more unfit to be president, sleepy, crooked Joe Biden or laughing Kamala,” he said, repeating previous derogatory terms for the pair.

“Despite all the Democrat panic this week, the truth is it doesn’t matter who they nominate because we are going to beat any one of them in a thundering landslide.”

Trump has kept a lower than usual profile in the days since the debate, a strategy an aide described as designed to allow Democrats to tear into each other following Biden’s dismal debate performance.

His remarks on Tuesday were notable for adding the vice-president’s name to numerous attacks on Biden policies, and sprinkling in mentions of both Rubio and Byron Donalds, a Republican Florida congressman also believed to be on Trump’s shortlist for vice-president.

Otherwise, it was a standard Trump stump speech, full of evidence-free claims that his 2020 election defeat was fraudulent; baseless accusations that overseas nations were sending to the US “most of their prisoners”; and a laughable assertion that a gathering of supporters numbering in the hundreds was really a crowd of 45,000.

It also touched on the surreal. Biden, he insisted, had raised the price of bacon four-fold.

“We don’t eat bacon anymore,” Trump said.

Electric cars, he said, “cheated” the US public because drivers had to stop for three hours to recharge their vehicles after every 45 minutes of driving. And, in an echo of one of the more bizarre debate exchanges with Biden over who was the better golfer, he challenged his White House successor to 18 holes over the Doral course while granting a 10-stroke concession.

“It will be among the most watched sporting events in history, maybe bigger than the Ryder Cup or even the Masters,” Trump said, pledging $1m to a charity of Biden’s choosing if he lost.

Returning to politics, Trump assailed Democrats for tax rises he said they wanted to impose; criticized Biden for the US military’s chaotic 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan; and promised to build an “iron dome” missile defense system for the US, if he was elected in November.

Perhaps worn down by the energy-sapping humidity, the crowd appeared mostly subdued, including yawns in the bleachers behind him as Trump drew to a close with slow music playing, and others tapping disinterestedly on their phones.

His campaign had touted the possibility of Trump announcing a vice-presidential pick on Tuesday, but in the end his only reference to the post was suggesting that Rubio might or might not still be in the Senate to vote to allow Nevada waitresses to keep their tips untaxed.

There was no mention of Ohio senator JD Vance, or North Dakota governor Doug Burgum, other Republicans said to be on the shortlist. Trump will rally again on Saturday in Pennsylvania, close to the Ohio border, with Vance expected to be a speaker.

Earlier on Tuesday, Democrats, on a Biden campaign call featuring first lady Jill Biden, and previewing Trump’s Doral rally, mocked him for his low-key approach since the debate.

“I hope he hasn’t exhausted himself with all the golf that he’s been playing,” Texas congresswoman Veronica Escobar said.

“Speaking of staying off the campaign trail, Trump has been hiding a lot recently, not just from voters and from the press, but from Project 2025.

“Donald Trump tried to pretend that he had nothing to do with Project 2025 despite the fact that it was written for him by the people who know him best. And yesterday, his campaign preview of the RNC platform, was just as unhinged and extreme as Trump himself. They left out some of the most unpopular specifics that we know they support.

“As usual, they’re trying to hide the ball from the American public.”

Trump, in his speech Tuesday, avoided mention of Project 2025 or his policy on abortion.

An incarcerated person at California’s largest women’s prison has died amid a brutal heatwave that has left residents without air conditioning begging for relief and warning of dire consequences for their health.

A woman in the Central California Women’s Facility, located in the Central Valley city of Chowchilla, died on Saturday as temperatures in the region climbed above 110F (43.3C). The California Coalition for Women Prisoners (CCWP), an advocacy group, said it appeared the woman suffered a preventable heat death. The woman’s daughter told the Sacramento Bee that her mother had complained about the physical toll of the summer weather for years.

Mary Xjimenez, a spokesperson for the state corrections department, said in an email that the woman was transported to a medical facility on Thursday and died on Saturday and that the “death appears to be the result of an ongoing medical condition and not heat related, but will be determined by the coroner’s office”. Tyson Pogue, the local sheriff-coroner, said it was too soon to say whether the death was due to heat and his office would conduct an autopsy.

News of the deaths comes as more than 146 million Americans were under extreme heat alerts across the nation, leaving people incarcerated in aging prison facilities without air conditioning particularly vulnerable. There have been reports of potentially fatal conditions inside jails and prisons during heatwaves across California and in Nevada, Illinois, Texas, Florida and other states this year.

The Chowchilla fatality has escalated fear and panic throughout the prison, advocates and incarcerated residents said. The cells in the overcrowded facility, which incarcerates more than 2,000 people, lack air conditioning, and residents said officials have failed to provide enough cold water and other supplies that would alleviate their suffering and reduce heatstroke risks.

“Please help us, they’re not doing anything for us,” Trancita Ponce, a Chowchilla resident, said in a statement shared by CCWP. “There is hot air blowing inside of our rooms, I have a huge migraine and I feel sick and other girls are throwing up.”

Another CCWF resident, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation, told the Guardian she’s been struggling with nausea and headaches, and that she had a thermometer in her area that recently showed it was 103F (39.4C). After residents’ complaints, the facility gave out ice water on Tuesday, but residents were only given two cups each, she said: “I’ve seen people passing out. This is inhumane … You feel like you’re dirt, like you’re nothing. If we were animals, they’d be treating us better.”

Elizabeth Nomura, state membership organizer for CCWP, who has been in contact with Chowchilla residents, said the facility has swamp coolers meant to lower temperatures in the cells, but that they weren’t working properly – an issue documented by the Modesto Bee during extreme heat last year.

“My friend said: ‘Help us, we can’t breathe,’” said Nomura, who was previously incarcerated at Chowchilla. “I’ve had heatstroke before [while incarcerated] and I know what it feels like to be so dehydrated that you can’t see. They are sitting in a room, toasting in what feels like an oven. They’re all suffering.”

Nomura said the death in the institution created a “dark cloud” for residents: “It brings that harsh reality forward for so many – that they could very well die in prison. Everyone in there is frantic, locked in these death chambers. It’s nothing short of cruel.”

Xjimenez said each state prison has a “heat plan coordinator” who monitors conditions and temperatures, and that housing units have some form of “cooling relief”, typically evaporative coolers and fans. During extreme heat, prisons will sometimes provide additional access to air-conditioned areas and increased access to water and ice, she said, and when temperatures exceed 90F (32.2C), some vulnerable residents are moved to air-conditioned rooms.

At Chowchilla, staff is providing ice water to all residents and “industrial floor fans” are cooling the housing units, she said.

“The California department of corrections and rehabilitation is closely monitoring the current heat wave and is coordinating with our state partners and the leadership in each of the state’s 32 prisons to ensure there are appropriate resources and response,” she said in a statement. “We are paying special attention to medically vulnerable incarcerated people, and will be providing additional water, ice, cooling areas, and information to our staff and incarcerated population on ways to prevent heat-related illnesses throughout this heat wave.”

Maybe this is how new empires rise. Out of the ruins of the old, with fresh visions and fresh blood, a supremacy that creates its own logic as it goes, until it begins to feel inevitable. Spain have taken the hardest possible road to Berlin, conquered Italy and Croatia and Germany and now France: their longest winning streak since 2010, a first final since 2012, and perhaps the strongest indication yet that this is a team worth remembering.

Indeed to anoint Spain as worthy finalists is to damn them with crushingly faint praise. In a way they have made this tournament, perhaps even saved it: shown that amid a fatberg of low blocks and tired, malfunctioning attacks it is possible for football to express as well as extinguish. Their women are already world champions and on Sunday the men have a chance to emulate their model: a little craft, a little graft and just a sprinkling of magic.

It was also the night 16-year-old Lamine Yamal became the youngest goalscorer in the history of this tournament, a triumph not just for his own prodigious talent but for the system that produces him and trusts him to thrash in a 25-yard thunderbolt. Dani Olmo added the winner on 25 minutes and yet for all the early drama this was a game that gripped right to its finish.

Perhaps posterity will forget just how ominously France started the game, with an early goal for Randal Kolo Muani and an early yellow card for Spain’s 38-year-old makeshift right-back Jesús Navas, which is exactly what you want when you have to play 76 minutes against Kylian Mbappé. But ultimately. Didier Deschamps’s team were a flimsy disappointment, not just out-passed but out-thought, devoid of solutions and brutally taunted in the closing minutes, as Spain kept the ball to a fiesta of olés.

How, exactly, did Spain manage to turn it around? Over the coming days those five scintillating first-half minutes will be wound and rewound at great length, and yet perhaps the only real conclusion worth drawing is not in terms of tactics but mentality. A goal down, in danger of being eaten alive, Spain simply intensified their efforts: a team utterly disdainful of the idea that they could ever be second best.

This is of course a function of belief, and Luis de la Fuente’s side have this in abundance. But it is also a function of self-assurance, a well-drilled system in which everyone knows everyone else’s jobs. No Robin Le Normand, no problem: Nacho simply slots in and has a monstrous night. No Pedri, no problem: Olmo simply picks up where he left off against Germany.

And if in doubt, get it to the wingers. At which point we should be clear: for all their pace and verve, Lamine Yamal and Nico Williams are not wingers in the traditional, chalk-studded sense. Indeed both goals came when they drifted into the centre, giving their full-back a brief dilemma, narrowing the pitch, sowing confusion.

Kolo Muani opened the scoring. It had not been coming. But Ousmane Dembélé played a nice whipped pass to Mbappé, who was played onside by Navas and then allowed to cross for Kolo Muani: France’s 87th attempt of the tournament from open play, and their first goal. Navas was booked shortly afterwards. As the famous meme has it: call an ambulance… but not for Spain!

Perhaps France reckoned they could simply manage this situation. Sit back, pass it around, maybe hit on the break. And against most teams, this would probably work. But Spain keep coming. Olmo, to Álvaro Morata, back to Lamine Yamal, and suddenly the ball was sailing into the top corner: a frankly ridiculous goal, and a moment that seemed to overcome Lamine Yamal slightly, a reminder that this is still just a child with a child’s feelings, for whom this abundant gift must just feel quite weird.

Four minutes later, a cross from Navas, cleared indeterminately, and in that moment perhaps Olmo doesn’t exactly know what he wants to do with it. All he knows is that he wants the ball. Brilliant feet, brilliant determination, and an emphatic finish that clipped the heels of Jules Koundé on the way in.

Suddenly, having built a gameplan on letting Spain have the ball, France decided they actually wanted it. Half-time came and went and while there were few extrinsic signs of panic, not much was happening for them either. Nacho and Navas were doubling up on Mbappé, maskless for the first time since the opening game. Adrien Rabiot and N’Golo Kanté were both disappointing, basically traffic islands cut adrift by Spanish passing, and were withdrawn after an hour.

Spain were still intermittently creating openings of their own: Mike Maignan had to scamper 45 yards out of his goal to tackle a steaming Williams. But perhaps it was inevitable, given those tired legs, that they would begin to drop back a little, and as we reached the business end, the pace began to sag and France began to encroach with their usual mesmerising menace.

They were unfortunate that a golden chance from 12 yards fell to left-back Théo Hernandez on his weaker foot. They were unfortunate when Mbappé cut inside late on – he couldn’t, surely? – and blazed over the bar. But on the ledger of this night, and this tournament, they can have few complaints. The old empire is bloated and decadent and joyless. A new world is coming.

Labour has appointed one of the country’s foremost climate experts to lead a “mission control centre” on clean energy.

Chris Stark, the former head of the UK’s climate watchdog, will head a Covid vaccine-style taskforce aimed at delivering clean and cheaper power by 2030.

The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero said the centre would work with energy companies and regulators and would be the first of its kind in Whitehall, following Keir Starmer’s plan for mission-driven government.

According to this model, ministers will focus on tackling five of the biggest challenges facing the country, one of which is clean energy.

Stark said: “Tackling the climate crisis and accelerating the transition to clean power is the country’s biggest challenge, and its greatest opportunity. By taking action now, we can put the UK at the forefront of the global race to net zero.”

Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, said: “Years of underinvestment has left our country suffering energy insecurity, with working people paying the price through their energy bills and a cost-of-living crisis. That cannot happen again.

“This new mission control centre, benefiting from the expertise and experience of Chris Stark’s leadership and bringing together the brightest and best in the national interest, will have a laser-like focus on delivering our mission of clean power by 2030.”

Stark was head of the UK’s Climate Change Committee (CCC) for six years until January. He was director of energy and climate change in the Scottish government between 2016 and 2018.

During his tenure the CCC recommended a UK net zero target for greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, which is now in law.

Stark won praise for his management of the CCC at a difficult point, when the government was briefing against many of the statutory watchdogs. Some on the right of the Conservative party would have liked to dismantle the 2008 Climate Change Act, under which the committee was set up with the mandate to advise on meeting the five-yearly carbon budgets.

Throughout his six years as chief, he maintained his steady insistence on telling the government truths it did not want to hear – on how far off-track the UK was straying from its climate goals, and how much more it would cost to delay action than to take it now.

Stark clashed with Conservative ministers at the time of his departure from the CCC earlier this year. He warned that the concept of “net zero” had turned into a political slogan used to start a “dangerous” culture war over the climate.

He said sensible improvements to the economy and people’s lives were being blocked as a result and that he would be “intensely relaxed” about losing the term.

Shaun Spiers, executive director of the Green Alliance thinktank, said the appointment would help Labour attract much-needed international investment for its plans. “This shows the government is ambitious and serious about delivering on its clean energy promises, and is really reassuring,” he said. “It’s been a very good few days [since the election] in action from Labour showing they want to get things done quickly.”

Reforms to the UK’s planning system have been a focus so far, including the lifting of an effective ban on onshore wind turbines in England, but Spiers said the government would have to look across a much wider range of issues to be successful in decarbonising electricity by 2030. “Planning is important, but it’s not the whole problem – grid connectivity is key, and there’s a need to build supply chains [for green equipment], building up skills, looking at the cost of borrowing, and attracting international investment. The appointment of Chris Stark will help with all of that.”

Renewable energy companies have begun work on new onshore windfarms in England for the first time in almost a decade after the new government reversed restrictions the Conservatives had put in place on turbines.

At least half a dozen renewables developers have begun identifying potential sites for full-scale windfarms in England after the Labour party swept to power last week with the promise to make Britain a clean energy superpower.

The new schemes are expected to renew the supply of onshore projects that are essential to the government’s plan to double Britain’s onshore wind capacity to 30GW by 2030.

Currently the only onshore windfarms in England’s planning pipeline are projects using one or two turbines, located on private property. The Guardian revealed last year that Ukraine built more onshore wind turbines than England in 2022 despite Russia’s invasion. But Labour’s decision to reform planning rules mean larger onshore windfarms could return to England by the end of the decade.

One of the UK’s biggest wind developers, Germany’s RWE, said it began identifying viable sites to develop onshore windfarms “some time ago”, in advance of Labour’s victory, and expects its pipeline of new projects to develop “quite quickly”.

Other energy companies including EDF Renewables, RES Group, Coriolis Energy and Ridge Energy have also confirmed that they are moving forward with plans for potential onshore windfarm projects in England.

Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, said: “The onshore wind ban was in place for nine years, and this government has removed it in 72 hours. We are wasting no time in investing in the clean homegrown energy that our country needs to lower bills and make Britain energy independent. We welcome investors responding to this announcement by moving forward with plans to invest in Britain’s clean energy future.”

RES Group, the Hertfordshire-based company which built England’s second ever windfarm in the early 1990s, has confirmed that it is considering a return to full-scale English projects in the future.

Ian Hunt, the global head of asset management for RES Group, said: “England is definitely a core market for us. But each project will be judged on its own merits and in light of the impact it might have on the environment and local communities.”

Trevor Hunter, a development manager from Coriolis Energy, said his company was considering half a dozen sites in England. Coriolis began undertaking bird migration surveys for sites in England “a good year ago” in anticipation of “where we believed things were going politically”, he said.

Industry sources believe that the return of onshore windfarms to England will face less opposition from local communities than prior to the Conservative government’s effective ban. This is due to technological advances which mean that fewer turbines are required to generate the same amount of clean electricity, and better financial incentives for local communities.

“There has also been a change in mindset in the last decade,” Hunt said. “People can see the effects of climate change, and they know that onshore wind can help emissions and bring down bills. There is a far greater level of public acceptance now.”

But, despite the fresh interest, industry analysts fear that the new Labour government may still struggle to meet its pledge to double Britain’s onshore wind capacity by 2030.

Energy data provider ICIS has predicted that the UK will miss its 2030 onshore wind target because it was “difficult to envisage a new government being timely enough” to improve the approval process and attract enough new projects before the end of the decade.

James Robottom, Renewable UK’s head of policy, said restarting an industry “will take time” because onshore windfarms can take up to seven years to develop, depending on their size and whether a grid connection is available.

“But we do know there is strong interest from developers, businesses and communities which are already exploring sites in England,” Robottom said. “We’ll be excited to see early community engagement and detailed environmental monitoring work on prospective sites starting soon.”

The Joe Biden re-election campaign is now a situation where you want to put your hands over your eyes even when your hands are already over your eyes. Like mine, all your sets of hands may have been clamped tightly to your lids since Biden’s franchise-killing performance in the first presidential debate 12 days ago, which his press secretary incredibly handwaved away by stating: “He had a cold”. A cold what? A cold sweat? A cold day in hell? A cold dead hand he’d like you to prise the nomination out of?

In news that launched a million grimace emojis, the answer turns out to be: all of the above. Biden is on a fightback. Yesterday he railed against “elites” in the Democratic party, proudly deploying that great Donald Trump innovation whereby the actual president is somehow not an elite. In a strongly worded letter you strongly know was worded by someone else, Biden ordered the Democrats to stop worrying and love the bomb (I lightly paraphrase). A neurologist repeatedly came to the White House last year to treat other people who work there, the White House insists, while Biden last week told a meeting of governors that he was fine, reportedly adding, “It’s just my brain”. OK! Last Friday, he gave a sit-down interview in which he was asked how he’d feel if he clung on in the race then lost to Trump. “As long as I gave it my all, and did as good of a job as I know I can do,” Biden judged, “that’s what this is about.”

Factcheck: I’m being told that is not at all what the forthcoming US presidential election is about. And listen, before we go on, please save your embossed letterhead/well-meaning digital death threats. I already know who much the worst candidate is. Furthermore – and it’s just a personal thing – I would very, very much like to see him beaten. Huge fan of American democracy here, which is to say – huge fan of the country of America having democracy. In fact, speaking of colds, you’ve probably heard the expression “When America sneezes, the world catches a cold”. Most of us in the droplet radius have zero clinical interest in discovering what the world catches when America does … whatever this is.

Which makes it somewhat painful that I am currently looking at White House-issued instruction pictures taken from the wings of various stages, about 10 footsteps from where you’d expect any occupier of those stages to make a speech – pictures with the heading: “walk to podium”. These are the leaked official templates for those guiding Biden through forthcoming events. There will doubtless be plenty on hand to claim that this is standard procedure when event planning at this level, to which the only reasonable response is: please, please tell that to the countless millions with access to televisions and the internet who have already seen Biden struggle with any number of stage entrances and exits! Please tell that to the optics! Please tell that to the vibes! In the meantime, please tell it to my subconscious because every time I look at one of these pictures it immediately rearranges itself into the image of a yawning hellchasm, beneath the heading “walk to the abyss”.

This is all more than beginning to feel like the path over the edge, which the Democratic establishment has thoughtfully plotted out by its truly timeworn tactic of hoping for the best, and in no way preparing for the worst. What’s the worst that can happen, ask people who already saw the worst happen once before. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice … autocracy? As far as Biden’s cognitive state is concerned, if only there had been different signs to all the signs there were.

Then again, only last year did the Democratic leadership in the House – which had a combined age of 973 or something – finally begin giving way to some non-thinned blood, having clung on in varying stages of decline out of … what? Selflessness? A fundamental/fundamentalist belief that they were the good guys? Forget the audacity of hope – this is the obnoxiousness of hope. The arc of history is now bending in the direction of the hellchasm. Why should it be a toss-up between Trump and a guy who in all conscience no one should say is operating without impairment? How dare this be the choice? This, alas, is the other reflection sparked by those “walk to podium” instruction manuals. Oh NOW you’re planning every last detail! Well, it’s like they say – micromanage all the tiny little things now and it absolutely won’t matter that you macro-fucked-up the big thing back when finessing a change wouldn’t have been a last-minute scramble.

Possibly the only minuscule bright spot currently are the amusing scenes in Hollywood, where starry donors are reportedly turning on Jeffrey Katzenberg, the DreamWorks co-founder-turned-Biden campaign co-chair, for supposedly concealing the president’s true state of mental fitness from them, and making them part with infinitesimal percentages of their money. As the Endeavor mogul Ari Emanuel remarked mildly last week: “We are in Fuck City”. (On the plus side for Katzenberg, the worst thing he’s ever done is no longer Quibi.)

None of this is how healthy democracies operate. Non-democracies? Oh yes. Petro-state princes are kept alive in western hospitals long after natural causes have kicked in, with their vast dependent entourages somehow unwilling to switch off the life support machine, what with it being directly connected to the cash tap. The Russians used to joke about Brezhnev that his daily routine ran as follows: reanimation, makeup, banquet, awards ceremony, clinical death. The people couldn’t do a whole lot about it, but they knew. Everyone knew. Spitting Image portrayed his successor-but-one, Konstantin Chernenko, as something kept in the freezer and only reanimated when occasion demanded. There are currently flashes of this vein of satire in every opening monologue on the US late-night TV shows.

As far as ways forward go, there are not exactly a whole load of tried and tested walks-to-podium. But the Democrats have surely exhausted the limits of irrational hope as a victory strategy. The gruelling presidential campaign has not even got fully under way. In the absence of a candidate who appears consistently rational, rational solutions must be found. In the meantime, we might prepare some simple briefing notes of our own for Biden’s strategists. You’re not going to defeat the world’s biggest “anti-elite” conman by railing against “elites” in the Democratic party. You’re not going to defeat the world’s biggest liar by being economical with your own actualité. And you’re not going to defeat the world’s biggest gaslighter by gaslighting people in your own way. There’s more than one way to be a hero. Sometimes the greatest legacy is knowing when to walk from the podium.

• Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist

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1. If you live in France, you can watch global warming happening live on the evening news – and it’s a hit with viewers

The woman behind this landmark innovation is Audrey Cerdan of France Televisions, France’s public broadcaster.

As announced on Tuesday, Cerdan is one of three winners of a 2024 journalist of the year award by our organization, Covering Climate Now, which for the past five years has been helping hundreds of newsrooms worldwide cover the climate crisis.

At a time when extreme heat is leaving hundreds dead from Mexico to India, when a category 5 hurricane is “flattening” entire islands in the Caribbean, and when US supreme court rulings are granting corporate polluters and their political patrons unprecedented legal protections, Cerdan and 50 additional Covering Climate Now Journalism Award winners are a stirring antidote to climate despair.

Their work demonstrates that telling the climate story well helps the public understand not only that the world is on fire, but also how to put the fire out.

In March 2023, France Télévisions stopped including a traditional weather report in its 8pm newscast and replaced it with a weather-climate report: in French, a Journal Météo-Climat.

Viewers of the new weather-climate report still saw maps dotted with numbers depicting the day’s high and low temperatures in Paris, Marseilles and other cities in France. The on-camera presenter, Anaïs Baydemir, still told them whether it would rain or shine tomorrow. But now, that basic weather news was communicated in the context of climate change.

From the opening seconds of the report, stretching across the bottom of the screen was a row of blue-and-white digits. The digits depicted, to an exactitude of eight decimal points, how much hotter France was now compared to a century ago, before humans’ burning of large amounts of coal, oil and gas began trapping excessive heat in the atmosphere.

The night Journal Météo-Climat premiered, on 13 March 2023, the dashboard registered 1.18749861C above the pre-industrial level. After 37 seconds, the dashboard’s last digit clicked up a notch to 1.18749862C; then, after two minutes and 28 seconds, another notch to 1.18749873C.

That was global warming, happening and presented in real time – an explicit rebuttal of the lie that climate change is somehow a hoax.

Within weeks, France Televisions’ ratings for that part of its evening news began climbing, according to the network. Cerdan, who spearheaded the innovation, credits the ratings boost partly to the fact that most of the show’s segments included a viewer’s question about climate change, answered by a scientist. (For example: will France still have four seasons under climate change? Yes, but they will be hotter.)

In short, if journalists tell the climate story in a creative way that genuinely helps people make sense of the world around them, people will watch or read that news.

2. Members of frontline communities often tell the climate story best

For this year’s awards, CCNow’s judges evaluated more than 1,250 entries from every corner of the globe. The reporting in the places most affected by the climate crisis stood out for its urgency, its compassion, and its commitment to telling personal stories.

For example, a second CCNow journalist of the year winner is Tristan Ahtone, a member of the Kiowa Tribe who wrote a blistering expose for Grist about US universities profiting from oil and gas production on stolen Indigenous lands.

A third “Journalist of the Year” is Rachel Ramirez, a climate reporter for CNN, whose upbringing in the Northern Marianas Islands informs her reporting on climate change’s disproportionate impact on women and girls and other issues of climate justice.

3. Climate crisis is a crime story

The planet didn’t overheat itself. Some of the best climate reporting highlights who the bad guys are, what they’re trying to get away with, and how they can be held accountable. The UK-based Centre for Climate Reporting, in collaboration with the BBC, revealed how Sultan Al Jaber – the CEO of the United Arab Emirates’ state-run oil company and president of the COP28 UN climate summit – used the latter role to lobby for oil and gas. Agence France-Presse reported that the global consultant firm McKinsey & Company, which publicly supports climate action, nevertheless used Cop28 to promote its clients’ plans to continue oil and gas production for years to come.

4. There is incredible bravery in some of the best climate reporting

Sometimes that bravery means angering sources who then no longer talk to you, or stirring up the trolls on social media. Other times, bravery takes a much more serious form.

In June 2022, the British journalist Dom Phillips and Indigenous activist Bruno Pereira were killed in the Vale do Javari, the second-largest indigenous area in Brazil, apparently in retaliation for their journalism exposing the destruction of the Amazon rainforest.

In 2023, 16 news outlets around the world, led by the Paris-based network Forbidden Stories, joined together to continue Phillips’s and Pereira’s work. Forbidden Stories’ investigations revealed how illegal industry and organized crime continue to stymie protection of the Amazon, whose health is vital to its Indigenous inhabitants and the world’s climate future.

5. There is good news on the climate beat

Solar, wind, storage batteries and other pillars of the green economy are growing by leaps and bounds, as mainstream business media have reported. But less publicized are solutions emerging from the grassroots, including in some of the most climate-vulnerable locations on earth. IndiaSpend, a digital outlet in India, won its award by profiling a frontline community’s ingenious efforts to cope with drought, illustrating how local knowledge and involvement can be key to successful climate change adaptation.

Covering Climate Now has long maintained that better news coverage is itself an essential climate solution. Without it, there simply won’t be the mass awareness and public pressure to drive governments, business, and society as a whole to make the rapid, far-reaching changes required to preserve a liveable planet.

The 51 winners of 2024 Covering Climate Now Journalism awards are certainly doing their part. We hope their example inspires fellow journalists everywhere to do the same.