The Guardian Environment

• Cabinet split emerges over controversial Rosebank oilfield decision

  Chancellor is in favour of North Sea project, but energy secretary has said she is leaning towards rejecting it

  A cabinet split has emerged over whether to approve drilling at the Rosebank oilfield, with the chancellor, John Healey, in favour of the controversial North Sea project.

  The energy secretary, Miatta Fahnbulleh, is ultimately in charge of the decision, and the Guardian reported last week that she was leaning towards rejecting it after granting permission for the smaller Jackdaw gasfield.

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• ‘They paved paradise’: fighting back over the loss of green spaces in Cameroon’s capital

  Concrete sprawl in Yaoundé has devastated the city’s trees and parks, so volunteers are stepping up, shrub by shrub

  A little piece of paradise is buried under the asphalt that is now lined with parked cars. The romantic spot where Sosthène Hugues Ngono used to bring his first dates had been green and beautiful. “It wasn’t just a park,” he says, standing at the edge of what is now a private car park in Cameroon’s capital, Yaoundé.

  “It was where I came to clear my head when things felt confused,” he says. “Where I met people; where I fell in love, more than once.”

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• Country diary: Jackdaws carve up the sky as dusk descends on the moors | Richard Smyth

  Eldwick Crag, West Yorkshire: In the low light and the high wind, these corvids are preparing to roost for the night. And they seem to be enjoying themselves

  Jackdaws like blustery weather the same way dolphins love choppy seas. There are faster flyers and more graceful flyers, but I can’t think of a bird that just enjoys flying as much as a jackdaw does. They bob and bank and yaw and wheel. And right now it’s roosting time in the copse above the quarry.

  A jackdaw roost – or rather the prelude to the roost, the bedtime gathering, the swirl of small, clacking crows above and about the trees, like particles about to be drawn into a plughole – isn’t a murmuration. It’s neither as spectacular nor as enigmatic as the twilight displays of starlings; it’s a flock, plain and simple (plain as the jackdaw’s call of its own name, “jack”). But like everything jackdaws do, it’s full of bustling, garrulous life.

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• Lights out: the island that goes dark to save young seabirds – in pictures

  Every autumn, Corvo Island in the Azores turns off its public lighting for a few key days to help fledgling Cory’s shearwaters as they attempt to fly to the ocean guided by the stars

  Once a year, Corvo, the smallest and most northerly island of Portugal’s Azores archipelago, goes dark. Since 2019, the island’s 450 or so inhabitants have chosen to switch off the lights every autumn for five nights to tackle the disastrous effects of artificial light on Cory’s shearwaters, a seabird endemic to the Atlantic Ocean.

  It began in 1991 when the community noticed huge numbers of deaths among young shearwaters.

  A newborn Cory’s shearwater chick

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• U-turn on EV policy could stall UK’s take-up of EVs | Fiona Harvey and Jasper Jolly

  The 2030 target for 80% of new cars to have zero emissions could be cut to as low as half

  Electric cars make people happy. More than nine in 10 EV drivers – 94% in a recent poll – are saving money, and a similar number would stick with electric for their next purchase, and recommend them to family and friends. Sales are soaring: more than half of the new cars sold in the UK last month were electric, if hybrids are taken into account, and about 28% of new car sales overall were electric only.

  This is hardly surprising, given that soaring petrol and diesel costs have pushed up the price of a full tank to about £120. EV drivers are paying about 2.4p a mile.

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