Social media platform Bluesky says it has gained 700,000 new users in the week following the US election. Bluesky, which was originally conceived as part of Twitter by its former chief executive Jack Dorsey, says the new sign-ups are largely from the US and UK. The company has increased its membership from 9 million people in September to 14.5 million ...

The UK has unveiled a punchy new climate goal to slash its emissions by 81% by 2035. The government said it is on a mission to “tackle the climate crisis in a way that makes the British people better off”, by investing in clean, home-grown power and cutting ties with volatile fossil fuel markets. Energy Secretary Ed Miliband said: “The ...

A legal challenge over the decision to give consent to the UK’s largest untapped oil field has begun in Edinburgh. Greenpeace and Uplift have jointly raised a judicial review at the Court of Session, arguing consent for the Rosebank oil field northwest of Shetland ought to be paused and reassessed. The two environmental groups are also arguing against the exploration ...

Battle lines have been drawn between the almost 200 countries meeting in Azerbaijan as they seek to agree a new pot of money to help developing countries cope with climate change. Over the last two days, leaders have swanned to the capital Baku for the COP29 climate summit to give glitzy speeches on how much they are doing and how ...

The Guardian has quit the social media platform X. The news organisation announced its decision on Wednesday to stop posting from official editorial accounts on the platform, formerly known as Twitter. “We think that the benefits of being on X are now outweighed by the negatives and that resources could be better used promoting our journalism elsewhere,” the outlet said ...

Tweaking the routes of a small number of planes could reduce the warming effect of contrails by half and cost less than €4 per ticket, according to a study. Contrails (or condensation trails) are the lines left in the sky when warm, moist exhaust fumes from an aircraft mix with the cold air to produce ice crystal clouds. They can ...

Keir Starmer’s arrival at COP29, with a promise to drastically cut the UK’s carbon emissions by 81%, will be a small ray of sunshine in an otherwise gloomy start to the climate talks. The election of Donald Trump, who has vowed to drag the world’s largest economy out of the negotiations, was a colossal setback for a round of talks ...

Argentinian negotiators have been summoned home from global climate talks in Azerbaijan by the President Javier Milei’s government. The team were ordered to pack up and leave on Wednesday, just three days into the two-week COP29 summit in Azerbaijan. No reason was given, but the Argentinian president – a right-wing populist who has previously dubbed the climate crisis a “socialist ...

Consumer rights group Which? is suing Apple for £3bn over the way it deploys the iCloud. If the lawsuit succeeds, around 40 million Apple customers in the UK could be entitled to a payout. The lawsuit claims Apple, which controls iOS operating systems, has breached UK competition law by giving its iCloud storage preferential treatment, effectively “trapping” customers with Apple ...

World leaders who came for the start of the United Nations climate change conference COP29 in Azerbaijan are now heading home. And as the whine of private jet engines fades in the skies above the capital Baku, their teams of negotiators get down to the real work: trying, once again, to keep the global climate talks from falling apart. Most ...