As demand for fossil fuels weakens, US coal baron Robert Murray – who has applied pressure to the Trump administration to support his industry – has placed his company into bankruptcy, according to Bloomberg. Associated Press reports that Ohio-based Murray Energy joins “a growing list of struggling miners” and that the move came “despite a flurry of regulatory breaks that its CEO pushed for – and received”. The company, which has 7,000 employees and operates 17 active mines, has received $350m in credit to keep its business operational through bankruptcy, according to CNN. Murray himself, who AP reports has referred to climate change as an “environmental hoax”, has been replaced as CEO by chief financial officer Robert Moore. Reuters also has the story, noting coal’s share of US power generation is set to fall to 22% by 2020, compared to around 25% today. The Financial Times says the high-polluting fossil fuel is being edged out by cleaner sources like natural gas and renewables, and notes the US government estimates domestic production will fall to 679m tonnes this year, down from one billion five years ago. Reuters also has a “factbox” with data on when coal-fired power plants in the US are set to shut.

On the other side of the world, the Australian Labor party has been accused of “sucking up to the coal lobby”, having repositioned itself as supportive of “traditional jobs” in the industry following an election defeat earlier this year, according to the Guardian.

Meanwhile, in the UK the struggling fracking industry has reported some success, with extraction company Cuadrilla announcing that shale gas it has tested in Lancashire is of high quality and could be fed straight into the grid, according to the Times.

Finally, the Financial Times reports on a new assessment of wind projects by Danish offshore wind developer Orsted. It has warned that windfarms will produce less power than expected in what could be an “industry-wide” issue, although CEO Henrik Poulsen called the change in guidance a “relatively small adjustment”.

Rising seas could “threaten to all but erase” some of the world’s “great coastal cities” and impact three times more people by 2050 than previously thought, according to new research reported by the New York Times. The newspaper lists cities like Bangkok and Ho Chi Minh City as particularly at risk. It says the authors of the new paper came to these conclusions after developing a more accurate way of calculating land elevation based on satellite readings. The Guardian reports the study’s conclusion that land currently home to 300 million people will flood at least once a year by 2050 without significant emissions cuts and stronger coastal defences. According to Reuters, earlier estimates had put this figure closer to 80 million, and most of the at-risk people are inhabitants of China, Bangladesh, India and Vietnam. MailOnline also reports on the new study. The Associated Press quotes Climate Central chief executive officer Ben Strauss, who co-authored the study. “This is a far greater problem than we understood,” he says. “Far more people live in risky places today than we thought and the problem only multiplies in the future.” The Hindu’s coverage of the paper reports that the number of Indians likely to be affected by rising sea levels may have been underestimated by as much as 88%.

After the UK announced that a general election would take place in December, the Guardian reports that the majority of people in the UK say climate change will affect their vote. The September polling, which involved 2,000 UK adults and was conducted just before the most recent Extinction Rebellion protests, also found almost two-thirds of people agreed climate change is the biggest issue facing humankind. The paper reports that 54% of people said climate change would affect their vote, with the proportion rising to 74% for under-25s. ITV News notes that the poll, conducted for environmental lawyers ClientEarth, also found that 63% of people agree that politicians are not discussing the issue of climate change enough in the run up to the election.

Elsewhere, BusinessGreen has a piece looking ahead to the election in the context of different parties’ promises about climate change and their competing visions to achieve “net-zero” emissions. It says the parties are “likely to clash about the pace of the net zero transition and the extent to which environmental standards are safeguarded throughout the Brexit process”. And the Guardian reports that the Conservatives’ election manifesto is being written by Rachel Wolf, who works as a lobbyist for the fracking company Cuadrilla as well as major internet companies like Amazon and Facebook.

Bristol could become the first city in the UK to ban diesel cars in parts of its city centre, according to BBC News. It reports the move, which is primarily an attempt to cut air pollution resulting from high levels of exhaust-derived nitrogen dioxide, would involve all diesel vehicles being excluded for eight hours a day, with some commercial vehicles charged in a larger zone. The council cabinet is set to debate the plans in November. The Daily Telegraph reports comments from Nicholas Lyes, RAC’s head of roads policy, that the move would have an “unprecedented” impact on drivers in the city, and bring the risk of congestion.

Across the Atlantic, in the wake of the decision by a handful of car companies to support the Trump administration in an attempt to block California from setting its own fuel efficiency and tailpipe emissions rules, Reuters reports that former state governor Jerry Brown has spoken out. According to the newswire, Brown has described General Motors (GM), one of the companies involved, as “Trump’s lapdog”, and told Congress the rollback of US clean car standards is “commercially suicidal”. An opinion piece by a Los Angeles Times business columnist says by siding with the president, Chrysler and Toyota are “asking for industry chaos”.

Meanwhile, BusinessGreen has a comment piece by Neil Brown from fund management company Liontrust asking if we have reached “peak car”. He says beyond short term issues such as “profit warnings of 2018 and trade war tweets of 2019”, the question is not whether to buy diesel, petrol or electric, but “whether to own a car at all”.

The Times reports on comments by BP’s chief financial officer that there is an “80% overlap” between the ambitions of his company and Extinction Rebellion (XR), the activist group known for bringing London to a standstill and being arrested in their thousands. According to the paper, Brian Gilvary said yesterday that the oil major, which has been targeted by XR protesters, agreed with them that the world should be acting faster to tackle climate change. He added that BP would unveil a new energy transition strategy by around July next year. The comments come as the company reported underlying profits of $2.3bn for the last three months, a sharp decline resulting from falling oil prices and the impact of Hurricane Barry on production in the Gulf of Mexico, according to the Guardian.

The European Central Bank should not use monetary policy to tackle climate change, according to remarks by Bundesbank President Jens Weidmann reported in the Financial Times. The paper says the statement by the head of Germany’s central bank sets up a “potential clash” with Christine Lagarde, who “plans to explore the idea after she becomes European Central Bank president on Friday”. According to Reuters, Weidmann thinks such action could “overburden policy, threaten its independence and risk its neutrality”. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reports on a new research paper by the Peterson Institute for International Economics think tank, stating the world’s top central banks can do more to help mitigate climate-change risks without giving up on goals like curbing inflation and boosting the economy.

In a separate piece, Reuters also reports on comments by the the European Fiscal Board in its annual report that the EU should revise its fiscal rules to allow governments to spend more on policies to fight climate change.

Ruminating on the devastation currently underway in parts of California due to widespread wildfires, veteran environmentalist Bill McKibben writes that “Californians are going first where the rest of us will follow”. He compares the state to other parts of the world that are “increasingly off-limits to humans”, referencing an editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle that had raised concerns about parts of California being “almost too dangerous to inhabit”. Supporting this rather depressing conclusion is a piece by David Wallace-Wells in Intelligencer, who tells readers this is “what counts as a good year now”, with the recent wildfires posing “just a fraction of the threat” to Californians as they have over the past two years. “Thanks to a protracted quiet period throughout the summer and early fall, the total damage from this year’s wildfires – barring a catastrophic late fall – will be barely a tenth of 2018’s total, and less than a quarter of 2017’s,” he writes. “And yet, as a measure of just how totally unprepared even the country’s wealthy, green liberal paradise is to deal with the brutality of even today’s amount of climate change, California is entirely overwhelmed this year, too.” An opinion piece in the New York Times looks at the debate around the key issues surrounding the fires.

Meanwhile, a feature in the Los Angeles Times by energy reporter Sammy Roth states that the enforced blackouts that have accompanied the wildfires “could make fighting climate change even harder” in California. “The state’s plans for slashing climate emissions depend on a stable electric grid delivering clean electricity to the cars, homes and businesses of the world’s fifth-largest economy. The jarring new reality of preemptive blackouts could frustrate those plans by throwing the grid’s reliability into doubt,” he writes.

And an editorial in the Washington Post concludes there is a “bigger lesson” for both California and every other state. “Hardening the nation to the effects of climate change will not just require sea walls around large coastal cities. It will demand expensive infrastructure changes and shifts in routine all over the economy.” It says while many of these changes will be “unexpected, unwelcome and difficult to predict”, leaders must try.

Jonathan Bartley, co-leader of the UK’s Green Party, has written a piece for Politics.co.uk outlining a series of questions he says must be addressed to politicians on climate-related issues. “As awareness of the ecological and climate crises we face grows, political parties are increasingly trying to highlight their green credentials. But we need to hold them to a high standard, to see how serious they really are about tackling the emergency,” he writes. Among these questions are “will you end fossil fuel subsidies?”, “will you stop airport expansion?” and “will you knock HS2 on the head?”.

By the end of this century, the growing season in Great Britain could be more than 5C warmer and 140mm per year drier on average, a new study suggests. Using “state-of-the-art, kilometre-scale climate change scenarios” to drive a land surface model and an econometric agricultural land use model, the researchers assess the impact of climate change on Britain’s vegetation and agricultural production. With sufficient rainfall, “warming favours higher value arable production over grassland agriculture, causing a predicted westward expansion of arable farming”, the results suggest. However, “drying in the east and southeast, without any CO2 fertilisation effect, is severe enough to cause a predicted reversion from arable to grassland farming”, the researchers add.

Millions more people could be at risk of sea level rise and coastal flooding than previously thought, a new study suggests. The researchers developed a new “digital elevation model” that refines the data from NASA’s Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) – the principal elevation dataset used for international assessment of coastal flood risks. The new model suggests that “190 million people occupy global land below projected high tide lines for 2100 under low carbon emissions”. These figures “triple SRTM-based values”, the researchers say. Under high emissions, the study indicates “up to 630 million people live on land below projected annual flood levels for 2100, and up to 340 million for mid-century, versus roughly 250 million at present”.

A new study “takes stock of the first 25+ years of adaptation finance under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)” and “seeks to understand whether adaptation finance has become more justly governed and delivered over the past quarter century”. The researchers “distinguish among three ‘eras’ of adaptation finance: (1) the early years under the UNFCCC (1992–2008); (2) the Copenhagen shift (2009–2015); and (3) the post-Paris era (2016–2018)”. They then “review the justice issues raised by evolving expectations and rules over the provision, distribution, and governance of adaptation finance”.