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Mike Barry, director of sustainable business at Marks & Spencer, said: “The signals are [fashion is] on the same trajectory as plastics and forests and alternatives to meat. These were all underlying concerns that got through to the mainstream consumer.

The government-backed sustainable clothing action plan, whose signatories include Next, M&S, Ted Baker, Primark and Asos, has committed nine major retailers to reducing waste being sent to landfill, water use and carbon footprint by 15% by 2020.

“We have only got 12 years to tackle damaging climate change,” she says. “We as consumers have to ask questions of brands. Brands have to make it part of what they do. These are massive companies run by some of the world’s richest men. Someone is doing OK out of it.”

Creagh adds that cheap fashion comes with a social as well as an environmental cost – with low-paid workers overseas unable to provide for their families. “We are not saying to people on a low income you can’t buy cheap clothes. We are saying it is time that the cost should reflect the true cost of the minimum wage and decent working conditions and growing stuff without pesticides. It needs to be sustainable from top to bottom and we don’t think the true cost is a £5 dress. That price is not being paid by us, it is being paid by someone else and the environment.”

Environmental campaigners say people who want to be more sustainable should choose quality clothes and make them last as long as possible by learning to repair or rework them. Buying secondhand or vintage clothing, considering renting outfits rather than buying, and washing garments less often at lower temperatures in a full machine can all help.

Sumner says: “The more you process and play with them the worse they are and the quality reduces. “Recycled fibres through traditional routes are poor quality.”

"America is at a tipping point, finely balanced between truth and lies, hope and hate, civility and nastiness. Many vital aspects of American public life are in play – the Supreme Court, abortion rights, climate policy, wealth inequality, Big Tech and much more. The stakes could hardly be higher. As that choice nears, the Guardian, as it has done for 200 years, and with your continued support, will continue to argue for the values we hold dear – facts, science, diversity, equality and fairness." – US editor, John Mulholland

Under the Congressional Review Act, any regulation finalized within 60 legislative days of the end of a presidential term can be overturned with a simple majority vote in the Senate.

The most significant of those would be the rules on methane, which were published by the Environmental Protection Agency. While most climate change regulations target carbon dioxide, the most damaging greenhouse gas, methane is a close second, lingering in the atmosphere for a shorter period of time but packing a bigger punch while it lasts. By some estimates, methane has 80 times the heat-trapping power of carbon dioxide in the first 20 years in the atmosphere.

has faced almost universal criticism from opposition legislators, environmentalists, industry analysts, Mexican and international business groups and even Mexico’s antitrust watchdog.

But the new legislation effectively restores preferences for state-run, fossil-fuel-driven plants that generate power at higher costs and produce greater carbon emissions.

“I think the impact of this reform is a major reversal,” said Lourdes Melgar, who was a top energy official in the administration of Mr. López Obrador’s predecessor, Enrique Peña Nieto. The Mexican president, she said, “has had a very nationalistic view of how to utilize resources.”

Gas-fired plants generate more than half of Mexico’s power; the vast majority of the natural gas is imported, with most of it coming from the United States, according to the Mexican government.

“This doesn’t have any economic logic,” said Víctor Ramírez Cabrera, spokesman for the Mexico, Climate and Energy Platform, a research group in Mexico City. He called the new model for power sourcing “absurd.”

“There is no way to comply with the Paris Agreement under these conditions,” Mr. Ramírez said. “Just give it up for dead.”

“Investment levels are dropping, and nobody wants to invest here,” said Israel Tello, a legal analyst at Integralia, a Mexico City-based consultancy group. “Legal uncertainty is the most lethal weapon against investment.”

Those potentially overlapping authorities have already provoked criticism from Republicans, some of whom voted against Mr. Regan’s confirmation because they said they did not know who is truly in charge of the administration’s climate and environment policy.

But most of the opposition centered on Democratic policy. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, called Mr. Biden’s agenda a “left-wing war on American energy.”

Mr. Regan has a reputation as a consensus-builder who works well with lawmakers from both parties. North Carolina’s two Republican senators, Thom Tillis and Richard Burr voted to support his nomination. Even Senate Republicans who voted against him had kind words.

“I really liked meeting and getting to know Michael Regan,” Senator Capito said. “He is a dedicated public servant and an honest man.”

The Obama administration tried to curb carbon pollution from the electricity sector with a regulation called the Clean Power Plan, which would have pushed utilities to move away from coal and toward cleaner-burning fuels or renewable energy. The Trump administration repealed that and replaced it with a far weaker rule that only required utilities to make efficiency upgrades at individual power plants.

Ms. McCarthy has already been in talks with automakers around new vehicle emissions standards, but the proposed new rule itself will also come from E.P.A.

At his confirmation hearing, he was introduced by North Carolina’s two Republican senators and stressed that he will work with every state to ensure that their concerns about the transition to cleaner energy are heard.

Republicans have said they are worried a rapid shift away from fossil fuels would kill jobs and stunt economic growth in the world’s top producer of oil and gas and have already criticized some of Biden’s early moves like canceling the permit for the Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada, and pausing new leases for oil drilling on federal land.

While the Postal Service moves lowly toward adopting electric vehicles, Robert Puentes of the Eno Center for Transportation, a transportation think tank, says Biden is on the right track in pushing for EVs.

"Transportation is the No. 1 emitter of greenhouse gases, and the U.S. lags far behind," he says. "And so for the president to try to put the government purchasing power in play and to try to convert those vehicles certainly makes sense."

It’s good to see this kind of realism. Remember, back in 2016 Donald Trump promised that he would restore coal to its former greatness, reopening shuttered mines — and voters in coal country believed him

The union’s document is in effect an endorsement, at least in principle, of the Biden administration’s plans to make action against climate change a centerpiece of its boost to infrastructure spending

It’s also a small but encouraging vindication of the thinking behind Build Back Better, the belief that climate action is most likely to be politically feasible if it eschews economic purism and relies more on carrots than on sticks.

The council, whose creation was announced in 2017, calls for carbon fees whose proceeds would be redistributed to families. This plan is part of a “bipartisan road map” for action.

This is, however, not the path the Biden administration is taking. Why?

First, the economic case for relying almost exclusively on a carbon tax misses the crucial role of technological development.

The reason large reductions in emissions look much easier to achieve now than they did a dozen years ago is that we’ve seen spectacular progress in renewable energy: a 70 percent fall since 2009 in the cost of wind power, an 89 percent fall in the cost of solar power.

And this technological progress didn’t just happen. It was at least partly a result of investments made by the Obama administration.

In retrospect, however, it is clear that government spending provided a crucial technological lift. And this suggests that public investment, as well as or even instead of a carbon tax, can be a way forward in fighting climate change.

Second, the idea that a carbon tax can achieve bipartisan support is hopelessly naïve. Only 14 percent of Republicans even accept the notion that climate change is an important issue

What might win over at least some of these voters, however, is the kind of program the United Mine Workers is calling for: targeted spending designed to help retrain former miners and support development in coal country communities.

while there’s a compelling case against relying exclusively on a carbon tax to fight climate change, public investment alone also probably isn’t enough. Eventually we will almost surely have to put a price on greenhouse gas emissions, politically difficult though that will be.

Promoting job creation in West Virginia or eastern Kentucky won’t be easy, and may be impossible.

we can and should make a good-faith effort to help workers and regions that will lose as we try to avoid environmental catastrophe, and in general to make climate policy as politically palatable as possible, even at some cost in efficiency. Climate action is too important a task to insist that it be done perfectly.

Based on the investor revolt this week, Wall Street clearly thinks that a substantial shift away from oil and gas is possible.

A massive shift away from fossil fuels is a prospect that Big Oil can no longer rule out.

The deal is United’s latest attempt to position itself as a risk taker shaking up an industry that is just getting back on its feet after a devastating pandemic. The airline announced a $20 million investment in an electric air taxi start-up, Archer, in February, and it is working on a “steady drumbeat” of more such bets, said Michael Leskinen, who heads corporate development at United.

What is not clear is whether Boom has solved the problems that forced British Airways and Air France to stop using the Concorde on trans-Atlantic flights — high costs, safety concerns and flagging demand.

Boom, which is working with Rolls-Royce, the British jet engine maker, said its plane would be more efficient than the Concorde; United estimates it will be 75 percent more efficient.

Mr. Scholl said the engines on Boom’s planes would rely entirely on sustainable aviation fuel, which can be made from waste, plants and other organic matter. Experts say such fuel could reduce emissions, but its supply is limited, it is expensive and its use does not eliminate greenhouse gas emissions.

But corporate and international travel is expected to rebound slowly from the pandemic, and some experts say it might not recover fully for years because companies have realized that they can be effective without as many in-person meetings.

Industry officials and the maritime organization say such arrangements give a voice to the experts. “If you don’t involve the people who are actually going to have to deliver, then you’re going to get a poor outcome,” said Guy Platten, secretary general of the International Chamber of Shipping.

The company, based in Virginia, did all the work and, on paper, the Marshall Islands became home to one of the world’s largest fleets. The government shared in the revenue — roughly $8 million a year as of recently, one official said.Things got thorny, however, when the foreign minister, Tony de Brum, traveled to the I.M.O. in 2015. His stories of his vanishing homeland had given urgency to the Paris talks and he expected a similar reception in London.

When delegates met last October — five years after Mr. de Brum’s speech — the organization had not taken any action. Proposals like speed limits had been debated and rejected.

German delegates were so upset that they threatened to oppose the deal, likely triggering a cascade of defections, according to three people involved in the talks. But European Union officials rallied countries behind the compromise, arguing that Europe could not be seen as standing in the way of even limited progress.

Mr. Biden’s environmental policy proposals include a pledge to “prioritize strategies and technologies that reduce traditional air pollution in disadvantaged communities.

Douglas Buffington, the deputy attorney general of West Virginia, said the rule “represents a big win for West Virginia coal.”

“If they had been tightening it could have been a huge blow to the coal industry,” he said

Already, president-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. is planning to move forward quickly in his first months in office to reinstate and strengthen many of the environmental rules rolled back by Mr. Trump

“We’re starting to see evidence that long-term exposure to air pollution — which disproportionately affects communities of color & low-income communities — is linked to COVID-19 death rates.”

Although the E.P.A.’s own staff scientists recommended tightening the current emissions rule, Mr. Wheeler said the scientific evidence was insufficient to merit doing so.

PM 2.5 pollution contributes to tens of thousands of premature deaths annually, and that even a slight tightening of controls on fine soot could save thousands of American lives

“There is a growing body of evidence that it is linked to neurological damage. And there is a growing body of evidence linking exposure of PM 2.5 to elevated levels of increased Covid morbidity.”

“The arguments against this rule are strong,” he said. “Even before that Harvard study there was very strong scientific evidence that stronger controls are merited. The Covid crisis reinforced that, but we didn’t need the Covid crisis to tell us that.”

The new rule retains a standard enacted in 2012, during the Obama administration. That rule limited the pollution of industrial fine soot particles — each about 1/30th the width of a human hair, but associated with heart attacks, strokes and premature deaths — to 12 micrograms per cubic meter

When E.P.A. scientists conducted that mandatory review, many concluded that if the federal government tightened that standard to about nine micrograms per cubic meter, more than 10,000 American lives could be saved a year.

The scientists wrote that if the rule were tightened to nine micrograms per cubic meter, annual deaths would fall by about 27 percent, or 12,150 people a year.

After the publication of that report, numerous industries, including oil and coal companies, automakers and chemical manufacturers, urged the Trump administration to disregard the findings and not tighten the rule

Between globalization, the Great Recession, and the not-so-great recovery, the middle class was slammed.

they felt it, too. Manyika’s research team asked more than 6,000 people in the United States, the U.K., and France to describe their economic status. Between one-third and 40 percent of respondents in each country felt that their incomes were falling behind. “And these people tended to blame free trade and immigrants for hurting their wages and ruining their culture,”

Anti-elite sentiment “has become the most potent political force in Europe,” writes Martin Gurri, author of The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium. “It brought Brexit in Britain, electoral defeat to German chancellor Angela Merkel, drove protests in France, shattered so many political coalitions that governed Europe since World War II, and raised to prominence new parties and persons nominally attached to the right or the left but always fractious, sectarian, ‘populist.’”

The changing media landscape is part of the story, too

In other words, saving the American middle class might take a leftist intervention, but saving the world will also require something very much like free-market globalism

iss conference.Right-wing nationalism is the solution that solves nothing. What’s needed instead is a movement that doesn’t just succeed in outraging voters, but actually seeks to use government to address the source of their outrage.

some members of the American left seem to be pointing to a compromise: a new system of universal guarantees supported by higher taxes and higher peacetime deficits in this context of a capitalist system

Globalization and poor governance created the conditions in which nativist insurgencies can grow. Social networks made it possible for political cults to organize around outrage.

any realistic plan to decarbonize the U.S. economy will almost surely require the sort of commercial technological breakthroughs that tend to come from private entrepreneurs tinkering with the products of publicly funded research

And to reduce global emissions, the United States will have to share its eco-technology with China, southeastern Asian countries, and African nations, which account for most of the growth in future emissions

For all the hatred directed toward the Davos crowd, there will be no economic growth in the West without policies that promote entrepreneurship and innovation.

For years government elites could silence political outsiders by denying them an audience. In the late 20th century, the Democratic and Republican Parties were terrifically effective at marshaling elite power to shape public opinion during the presidential-election process. Voters didn’t select candidates at random; rather, as political scientists like to say, “the parties decided” on the favored candidates and used their power to funnel voters toward these insiders.

That was before the Cambrian explosion of digital media made it impossible for insiders to control their nomination processes

nativist movements are gaining power by opposing the values of openness and empiricism. These nativists have often thrived by arguing that free markets and globalization have impoverished the middle class and destroyed all sense of national identity or sovereignty.

“All this has happened chiefly because countries—from China to India to Ethiopia—have adopted more market-friendly policies,” the CNN host Fareed Zakaria wrote in The Washington Post.

But there’s a good reason that commentators tend to lump together Trump, Brexit, and other “populists” and “populist” movements: They’re built to oppose rather than lead, and right now it’s fair to say they’re in a shambles, unable to fulfill their nativist promises. In the U.K., Prime Minister Theresa May’s Brexit deal was voted down in humiliating fashion. In the United States, Trump’s record-breaking government shutdown led not to a wall but to declining poll numbers for the president. Both May and Trump had to cancel their appearances at the Sw

What’s more, taxing the rich to fund universalist programs directly addresses middle-class insecurities caused by global capitalism—unlike, say, building a giant border wall. Free markets without income security have been a recipe for instability. So have socialist policies that stamp out free markets.

At a conference symbolizing the promise of capitalism, every non-plutocrat is fighting for scraps.

is not aerosol-generating – in fact, the aerosols are reduced compared to just normal breathing and speaking,”

“However, cough really is a potent generator of aerosols.”

“It goes along with a growing body of evidence, which is telling us that activities such as talking, and coughing in particular, are aerosol-generating.

Dodd and his colleagues recruited healthy volunteers to receive CPAP or a related treatment called high flow nasal oxygen (HFNO) in a highly ventilated operating theatre.

This enabled them to precisely measure the aerosols emitted in the absence of any background particles. They also took measurements when the volunteers breathed, talked and coughed normally, and separately measured aerosol emissions from Covid-19 patients – the first time such measurements have been taken.

Coughing generated at least 10 times more aerosols than speaking or breathing, and all of these activities generated more airborne particles than CPAP – even when the volunteers wore a surgical mask.

Aerosol emissions were similar between Covid patients and healthy individuals.

temperature increases are predicted to cause colossal disruption: 10 million more people displaced as a consequence of higher sea levels; greatly increased risk of fires, drought and extreme weather of all kinds; shrinkage of plant and insect habitats with massive effects on agriculture as well as nature; the extinction of coral.

It is extremely difficult to see a safe way through the next few decades that does not involve a drastic reorientation of global priorities, towards wildlife and away from consumption

If the world is to come together as we need it to, human values will have to assert themselves over the forces of capital

Richard Powers’ recent Booker-shortlisted novel The Overstory focused on the immense psychological challenge, for humans, of making wildlife a priority above the struggles between ourselves that so preoccupy us all.

US activist Emily Johnston takes as a starting point her sense of “despair” about the state of the oceans, but goes on to argue that “the only sane thing to do is to radically change our agriculture and our forestry to help stabilise the climate”

everyone who is serious about addressing what Thunberg rightly calls an “existential crisis” must be honest about what the process of getting there will entail.

the number of British adults who regard climate as a priority remains small: only 27% see it as one of the top three issues. That figure doubles among 18- to 24-year-olds.

when it comes to the environment, as the Indian writer Arundhati Roy has argued, imagination is at the heart of it; and the question of whether we can see the future clearly enough to prioritise it over short-term gain