The US Congress has voted to open Alaska’s remote Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) to oil and natural gas drilling. With the passing of yesterday’s tax overhaul bill, the attached ANWR drilling provision was passed too. “After decades and decades in this chamber, we are opening up a small non-wilderness area of the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge for responsible development. That is the most ambitious step we have taken in years to secure our own energy future,” said House Speaker Paul Ryan. The legislation, which Trump is expected to sign into law, would lift an almost 40-year old ban on prospecting for oil and natural gas in the refuge’s coastal plain, says Bloomberg, and is expected to generate $1bn over 10 years once it’s opened to oil leasing. But actual drilling may still be years away as the effort faces exhaustive environmental reviews and likely lawsuits, notes another Bloomberg article. Senator Maria Cantwell, a Democrat, said the fight over the drilling was not over. “In fact I would say today is the beginning,” Cantwell told Reuters, adding that Democrats would make sure the Trump administration follows all environmental laws before allowing drilling. The New York Times takes a look at what happens next, noting that the legislation requires that the Department of Interior conduct one lease sale within four years and a second within seven. “But there are many steps that must be taken before those sales can be held, and the process is not completely clear,” it adds. InsideClimate News looks at whether oil companies will be interested in the chance to explore for oil and gas in the region. “In the current economic environment, it’ll be a tough sell,” a senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Global Energy Center told them. A lack of nearby infrastructure, a low oil price and little knowledge of how much oil the area contains are all compounding challenges, the article says. Writing in the Guardian, author and Alaskan resident Kim Heacox says development in the ANWR would “be a spider web of roads, pipelines, well pads and landing strips smack in the middle of the biological heart of the refuge”. Also in Alaskan news, a new study finds that snowfall in south-central Alaska has dramatically increased over the last 150 years because of climate change, reports E&E News. “Summer snowfall has risen by about 49% since the mid-19th century, and winter snowfall has increased by a whopping 117%,” it says. Yale Environment 360 and Vice also have this story.

A national plan to expand the network of wind farms across Scotland with a new generation of “bigger, more efficient” turbines has been unveiled by ministers. Scotland’s first ever Energy Strategy includes a new target to generate half of Scotland’s power from renewables by 2050, including a push for more onshore wind. Energy minister Paul Wheelhouse told MSPs yesterday that “We expect onshore wind to play a growing and invaluable role in our transition to a low carbon future. The support and investment frameworks for onshore wind have fundamentally changed just as the technology is also changing with moves towards larger, more efficient turbines which have made onshore wind highly cost effective.” Alexander Burnett, the Scottish Tories’ energy spokesman, said the figures “further prove the SNP’s obsession with wind farms” and argued more developments must only be allowed “with the consent of those living in the area”, reports the Telegraph. The Scottish edition of the Daily Mail reports that the strategy will mean “an explosion in the number of wind farms littering the landscape”. Its double-page spread includes a comment piece from John Constable, energy editor of the climate sceptic lobby group Global Warming Policy Forum, which argues that “there is hardly a Munro left in Scotland from which you cannot see a wind farm”. Business Green delves into the details of the strategy, which includes £80m in new investment in the energy sector – £60m for low-carbon innovation and £20m for energy investment.

France’s parliament has passed into law a ban on producing oil and gas by 2040. No new permits will be granted to extract fossil fuels and no existing licences will be renewed beyond 2040, when all production in mainland France and its overseas territories will stop. The largely symbolic bill will have little impact on the French economy, says Business Green, as France only produces about 1% of its oil and gas from domestic sources. France’s ecological transition minister Nicolas Hulot had signalled the move back in June. Think Progress also has the story.

New research reveals the scale of the impact of human activity on land surfaces and vegetation for the planet and its atmosphere. The study, published in Nature, uses a series of detailed maps derived from satellite information and other types of ecological measurements to estimate that there are 450bn tonnes of carbon contained in Earth’s current vegetation. But that number could be about 916bn tonnes “if humans somehow entirely ceased all uses of land and allowed it to return to its natural state”, the Post says. “The inference is that current human use of land is responsible for roughly halving the potential storage of carbon by that land,” the article concludes. “Our finding is in line with the statement that the impact of humans on the climate was quite considerable also before the industrial times,” says lead author Karl-Heinz Erb.

In a Long Read article for the Guardian, investigations correspondent Holly Watt takes an in-depth look into the project to build a new nuclear power station at Hinkley Point in Somerset. “When it is finally completed, Hinkley Point C will be the most expensive power station in the world,” says Watt, but “to reach that stage, it will need to overcome an extraordinary tangle of financial, political and technical difficulties”. “The project was first proposed almost four decades ago, and its progress has been glacial,” she writes, “but the irony of Hinkley Point C is that by the time it eventually starts working, it may have become obsolete”. Delving into the history of the project, Watt finds that “the story of Hinkley Point C is that of a chain of decisions, taken by dozens of people over almost four decades, which might have made sense in isolation, but today result in an almost unfathomable scramble of policies and ambitions.”

Burning wood pellets to generate energy could “cause an unseen surge in carbon emissions and fatally undermine the Paris Climate Agreement”, writes freelance author and journalist Fred Pearce for Yale Environment 360. Most of the new “green” power installed in the European Union since 2009 “has actually come from burning wood in converted coal power stations”, says Pearce. Carbon losses from forests supplying power stations are “seldom reported in national inventories”, he notes, meaning “wood burning is turning into a major loophole in controlling carbon emissions”. The US could soon follow suit, he adds. There is a risk that “Europe’s promises for meeting its Paris climate commitments will go up in smoke”, argues Pearce, and that “the US’s own CO2 emissions could resume their upward path even quicker than President Donald Trump intends”.

Low-level clouds are an important positive feedback in most climate models, as they are expected to be reduced in a warmer world. This study looks in detail at this feedback, and finds that it could be negative or positive depending on how evaporation and inversion strength is parameterized. They find that the positive feedback parameterizations associated with inversion strength are a better predictor of low-level clouds. Their results show that increases in surface evaporation can have a very substantial impact on the rate of increase in radiative cooling with warming, by modifying the temperature and humidity structure of the atmosphere. This has implications for understanding the factors controlling hydrological sensitivity.