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    The Guardian view on microplastics research: questioning results is good for science, but has political consequences | Editorial

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    Errors in measuring microplastic pollution can be corrected. Public trust in science also needs to be shored up It is true that science is self-correcting. Over the long term this means that we can generally trust its results – but up close, correction can be a messy process. The Guardian reported last week that 20 recent studies measuring the amount of micro- and nanoplastics in the human body have been criticised in the scientific literature for methodological issues, calling their results into question. In one sense this is the usual process playing out as it should. However, the scale of the potential error – one scientist estimates that half the high-impact papers in the field are affected – suggests a systemic problem that should have been prevented.The risk is that in a febrile political atmosphere in which trust in science is being actively eroded on issues from climate change to vaccinations, even minor scientific conflicts can be used to sow further doubt. Given that there is immense public and media interest in plastic pollution, it is unfortunate that scientists working in this area did not show more caution. Continue reading… More

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      How Trump’s promise to slash energy bills in half has failed across the US

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      Guardian analysis shows electricity bills were up 6.7% last year, and much higher in some states, and gas bills up 5.2%Trump’s failed energy bill pledge leaves US households struggling: ‘It’s obscene’Donald Trump has comprehensively failed to meet a key election promise to slash Americans’ energy bills in half within the first year of his presidency, with power prices instead surging across the US.The average household electricity bill in the US was 6.7% more expensive in 2025 compared with the previous year, according to a Guardian analysis of data from the Energy Information Administration (EIA), the Department of Energy’s statistical arm. The increases meant that, on average, US households paid nearly $116 more across 2025 than they did in 2024. Continue reading… More

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      The crisis whisperer: how Adam Tooze makes sense of our bewildering age

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      Whether it’s the financial crash, the climate emergency or the breakdown of the international order, historian Adam Tooze has become the go-to guide to the radical new world we’ve enteredIn late January 2025, 10 days after Donald Trump was sworn in for a second time as president of the United States, an economic conference in Brussels brought together several officials from the recently deposed Biden administration for a discussion about the global economy. In Washington, Trump and his wrecking crew were already busy razing every last brick of Joe Biden’s legacy, but in Brussels, the Democratic exiles put on a brave face. They summoned the comforting ghosts of white papers past, intoning old spells like “worker-centered trade policy” and “middle-out bottom-up economics”. They touted their late-term achievements. They even quoted poetry: “We did not go gently into that good night,” Katherine Tai, who served as Biden’s US trade representative, said from the stage. Tai proudly told the audience that before leaving office she and her team had worked hard to complete “a set of supply-chain-resiliency papers, a set of model negotiating texts, and a shipbuilding investigation”.It was not until 70 minutes into the conversation that a discordant note was sounded, when Adam Tooze joined the panel remotely. Born in London, raised in West Germany, and living now in New York, where he teaches at Columbia, Tooze was for many years a successful but largely unknown academic. A decade ago he was recognised, when he was recognised at all, as an economic historian of Europe. Since 2018, however, when he published Crashed, his “contemporary history” of the 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath, Tooze has become, in the words of Jonathan Derbyshire, his editor at the Financial Times, “a sort of platonic ideal of the universal intellectual”. Continue reading… More

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      US judge lets Danish firm resume Rhode Island offshore wind project halted by Trump

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      Ørsted and other wind developers have faced repeated disruptions to multibillion dollar projects under TrumpA federal judge on Monday cleared Danish offshore wind developer Ørsted to resume work on its nearly finished Revolution Wind project, which Donald Trump’s administration halted along with four other projects last month.The ruling by US district judge Royce Lamberth is a legal setback for Trump, who has sought to block expansion of offshore wind in federal waters. Continue reading… More

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      Why is Trump interested in Greenland? Look to the thawing Arctic ice | Gaby Hinsliff

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      Forecasts suggest that global heating could create a shortcut from Asia to North America, and new routes for trading, shipping – and attackAnother week, another freak weather phenomenon you’ve probably never heard of. If it’s not the “weather bomb” of extreme wind and snow that Britain is hunkering down for as I write, it’s reports in the Guardian of reindeer in the Arctic struggling with the opposite problem: unnaturally warm weather leading to more rain that freezes to create a type of snow that they can’t easily dig through with their hooves to reach food. In a habitat as harsh as the Arctic, where survival relies on fine adaptation, even small shifts in weather patterns have endlessly rippling consequences – and not just for reindeer.For decades now, politicians have been warning of the coming climate wars – conflicts triggered by drought, flood, fire and storms forcing people on to the move, or pushing them into competition with neighbours for dwindling natural resources. For anyone who vaguely imagined this happening far from temperate Europe’s doorstep, in drought-stricken deserts or on Pacific islands sinking slowly into the sea, this week’s seemingly unhinged White House talk about taking ownership of Greenland is a blunt wake-up call. As Britain’s first sea lord, General Sir Gwyn Jenkins, has been telling anyone prepared to listen, the unfreezing of the north due to the climate crisis has triggered a ferocious contest in the defrosting Arctic for some time over resources, territory and strategically critical access to the Atlantic. To understand how that threatens northern Europe, look down at the top of a globe rather than at a map.Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist Continue reading… More

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      ‘A colossal own goal’: Trump’s exit from global climate treaties will have little effect outside US

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      For much of the last 30 years, the rest of the world has been forced to persevere with climate action in the face of US intransigenceOutrage as Trump withdraws from key UN climate treaty along with dozens of international organisationsDonald Trump’s latest attack on climate action takes place amid rapidly rising temperatures, rising sea levels, still-rising greenhouse gas emissions, burgeoning costs from extreme weather and the imminent danger that the world will trigger “tipping points” in the climate system that will lead to catastrophic and irreversible changes.The US president’s decision to withdraw from the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the world’s leading body of climate scientists, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, will not alter any of those scientific realities. Continue reading… More

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      Outrage as Trump withdraws from key UN climate treaty along with dozens of international organisations

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      Experts decry move to leave UNFCCC as ‘embarrassing’ as president orders withdrawal from 66 international groupsDonald Trump has sparked outrage by announcing the US will exit the foundational international agreement to address the climate crisis, cementing the US’s utter isolation from the global effort to confront dangerously escalating temperatures.In a presidential memorandum issued on Wednesday, Trump withdrew from the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), along with 65 other organizations, agencies and commissions, calling them “contrary to the interests of the United States”. Continue reading… More

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      From rent to utility bills: the politicians and advocates making climate policy part of the affordability agenda

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      As the Trump administration derides climate policy as a ‘scam’, emissions-cutting measures are gaining popularityA group of progressive politicians and advocates are reframing emissions-cutting measures as a form of economic populism as the Trump administration derides climate policy as a “scam” and fails to deliver on promises to tame energy costs and inflation.Climate politics were once cast as a test of moral resolve, calling on Americans to accept higher costs to avert environmental catastrophe, but that ignores how rising temperatures themselves drive up costs for working people, said Stevie O’Hanlon, co-founder of the youth-led Sunrise Movement. Continue reading… More