Watchdog for England and Wales looking into claims refurbishment costs are ‘breathtakingly high’ compared with other countries
The water regulator for England and Wales, Ofwat, is investigating claims water companies are spending many times more on refurbishment projects than operators in comparable countries, leading to much higher bills, in what campaigners have described as a “rip-off”.
Experts have said privatisation of water companies has led to an overinflation of the costs of building infrastructure such as sewage works, as they are less incentivised than governments to find value for money for taxpayers. They are also allowed to borrow more money based on the valuation of their assets.
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Breaking Waves: Ocean News
04/23/2025 - 07:00
04/23/2025 - 05:26
Stretch of major highway shut as 3,000 people moved to safety and homes left without power
A fast-moving wildfire burning in New Jersey forced thousands of people to temporarily evacuate on Tuesday, closed a stretch of a main highway and reached a shuttered nuclear power plant.
Flames from the Jones Road wildfire in Ocean county had reached buildings on the campus of the Oyster Creek nuclear power plant, according to the local Lakewood Scoop newspaper.
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04/23/2025 - 05:00
American Lung Association’s study says almost 156 million people live in areas with unhealthy levels of soot or smog
Almost half of Americans are breathing in dangerous levels of air pollutants, a new report shows, a rise compared with a year ago and likely to further increase in coming years thanks to the climate crisis and the Trump administration’s sweeping environmental rollbacks.
Just over 156 million people live in neighborhoods with unhealthy levels of soot or smog – a 16% rise compared with last year and the highest number in a decade, according to the American Lung Association (ALA) annual state of the air report.
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04/23/2025 - 05:00
About 89% of the public want their governments to do more to tackle the climate crisis – but don’t know they’re the majority
The Guardian is joining forces with dozens of newsrooms around the world to launch the 89% Project – and highlight the fact that the vast majority of the world’s population wants climate action. Read more
A superpower in the fight against global heating is hiding in plain sight. It turns out that the overwhelming majority of people in the world – between 80% and 89%, according to a growing number of peer-reviewed scientific studies – want their governments to take stronger climate action.
As co-founders of a non-profit that studies news coverage of climate change, those findings surprised even us. And they are a sharp rebuttal to the Trump administration’s efforts to attack anyone who does care about the climate crisis.
Mark Hertsgaard and Kyle Pope are the co-founders of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now
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04/23/2025 - 03:35
Wines produced after 2010 showed steep rise in contamination of trifluoroacetic acid, analysis finds
Levels of a little-known forever chemical known as TFA in European wines have risen “alarmingly” in recent decades, according to analysis, prompting fears that contamination will breach a planetary boundary.
Researchers from Pesticide Action Network Europe tested 49 bottles of commercial wine to see how TFA contamination in food and drink had progressed. They found levels of trifluoroacetic acid (TFA), a breakdown product of long-lasting Pfas chemicals that carries possible fertility risks, far above those previously measured in water.
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04/23/2025 - 01:47
Take that Antony Greem
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04/23/2025 - 01:25
In early 2023, the planet's worst coral bleaching event began. More than two years later, 80% of the planet's reefs have been affected by successive marine heatwaves hitting ecosystems from the Great Barrier Reef to the Mesoamerican Reef
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04/23/2025 - 01:00
‘Chemical fingerprint’ shows 46% of wood samples certified as sustainable did not come from labelled country of origin
Nearly half of birch wood certified by leading sustainability schemes is misidentified and does not come from the labelled country of origin, according to new testing. The analysis raises fears that large quantities of sanctioned wood from Russia and Belarus are still illegally entering Britain.
New research by World Forest ID, a consortium of research organisations that includes Kew Gardens and the World Resources Institute, scrutinised the accuracy of dozens of harvesting-origin claims on birch products, which had almost entirely been approved by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) and Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification (PEFC) sustainability schemes.
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04/23/2025 - 00:00
Labour must deliver the green transition voters want, leaving Reform and the Tories on the side of economic decline and dictators
Which former British prime minister described the climate emergency as “a clock ticking to the furious rhythm of hundreds of billions of pistons and turbines and furnaces and engines … quilting the Earth in an invisible and suffocating blanket of CO2”?
The florid style gives it away. You’d guess Boris Johnson even if you’d forgotten that the master of Brexit bombast also had a sideline in net zero evangelism. It wasn’t the most memorable part of his repertoire and it didn’t catch on as a Conservative catechism.
Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist
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04/22/2025 - 23:00
An ashen pallor and an eerie stillness all that remains where there should fluttering fish and vibrant colours in the reefscape, one conservationist says
The world’s coral reefs have been pushed into “uncharted territory” by the worst global bleaching event on record that has now hit more than 80% of the planet’s reefs, scientists have warned.
Reefs in at least 82 countries and territories have been exposed to enough heat to turn corals white since the global event started in January 2023, the latest data from the US government’s Coral Reef Watch shows.
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