Oil giant BP is buying Chargemaster, UK’s largest electric charging network for £130m, the BBC reports. The network, which will be rebranded BP Chargemaster, has 6,500 charging points and sells electric vehicle charging points for home use. The move will begin to result in the deployment of fast chargers at BP’s 1,200 forecourts over the next year, the Guardian reports. BP said it would prioritise ultra-fast 150KW charging on the network, which can add around 450-600 miles of range per hour of charging. BP estimates the number of electric vehicles will hit 12m by 2040. The Financial Times says the acquisition is the latest in a series by traditional oil majors, including Shell and Total, aimed at building up a position in the electric vehicle market. The story was widely covered elsewhere in the media, including in Reuters, Bloomberg, the Telegraph, the Times and BusinessGreen. Separately, Reuters reports on comments by Volkswagen’s labour chief Bernd Osterloh, who said proposed European Union anti-pollution rules would mean his firm needs to supply one million electric cars by 2025, which may ruin its profits.

New standards agreed yesterday by the UN’s aviation agency ICAO to govern its carbon offset deal, CORSIA, has left campaigners unimpressed, BusinessGreen reports. They described it as an “extremely disappointing” move to allow airlines to claim credit for “low-carbon” fossil fuels as long as they emit less carbon over their life-cycle than standard fuels. Climate Home News reports that negotiators may also allow airlines to use a glut of old offsets to meet their quotas. “Billions of dormant projects are ready to flood the market with cheap credits, according to European analysts, without driving any new emissions reductions,” CHN notes. Carbon Brief covered the CORSIA deal back in 2016 when it was first agreed on.

Minnesota regulators on Thursday approved Enbridge Energy’s proposal to replace its ageing Line 3 oil pipeline, ABC News reports. The move angered opponents, who say the project threatens pristine areas and have vowed Standing Rock-style protests if needed to block it. InsideClimateNews reports that the state regulators were unanimous in their decision to approve the pipeline’s construction, which will increase the flow of tar sands crude oil from Canada to refineries in the US. Reuters also has the story.

Four of the eleven offices leased by the UK government’s Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) received the lowest G energy display rating, the BBC reports. The BBC discovered the energy display ratings, which are used to measure the energy performance of public buildings, using a Freedom of Information request. Only one building the department leases received an A rating, while the department’s headquarters scored below average, with an E rating.

Fires such as the recent huge wildfire on Saddleworth Moor are becoming more common, and one of the reasons is climate change, writes Fabrizio Manco, a senior lecturer in ecology at Anglia Ruskin University. “Warmer temperatures in the summer and associated drier conditions desiccate plant materials and create more vegetation litter, providing more fuel for these fires,” he writes. Manco notes that several studies have linked the increase of wildfires with climate change in various parts of the world, such as North America and Southern Europe. However, he adds that: “Despite its destructive power, fire is an important ecological process that can benefit several endangered species by maintaining their habitat… But climate change and human activities increase the vulnerability of those habitats to uncontrolled wildfires and higher population densities near these areas will potentially put more people and houses at risk.”

“Doug Ford says his first official act as leader of Canada’s most populous province… will be to kill [its recent] cap-and-trade programme,” the Economist notes. In an article looking at the implications of this for Canada’s plan for a national carbon price. “Mr Ford’s decision will not wreck the plan in the first instance, but it may only be a matter of time,” the article says. It adds that polls indicate the United Conservative Party, which is promising to end Alberta’s climate-change plan, will replace the climate-friendly New Democratic government in Alberta next year. “Imposing a carbon tax on Canada’s largest province will be tough. Taking on Alberta at the same time could well prove impossible.”

According to legal experts, news of Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy’s retirement means “nothing good” for the future of environmental protection and climate action, writes journalist Kyla Mandel. Kennedy has served as the deciding vote in several landmark environmental rulings over the past three decades, most notable in Massachusetts v. EPA in 2007. “This case established two major precedents: that states can sue the federal government for failing to regulate greenhouse gas emissions and that greenhouse gas emissions are pollutants under the Clean Air Act and the EPA must decide whether and how to regulate them.” Most experts agree that Kennedy will almost certainly be replaced with a more conservative judge, adds Mandel, tipping the balance further to the right and leaving key environmental protection rulings vulnerable.

Understanding the rate of ice melt way down in Antarctica is incredibly important for global sea levels, says article in Vox. “According to [an international team of 80 researchers], the rate of ice loss has accelerated to 219 gigatons per year between 2012 and 2017, a bit more than the peak flow rate of Niagara Falls. That’s 219,000,000,000 metric tons.” But how do you even wrap your mind around a number that large?, the article asks. It goes on to help readers to visualise it using representations of olympic-size swimming pools.

The local warming an area experiences under 1.5C of global average temperature rise isn’t necessarily a good predictor of warming under 2C, a new study suggests. Using a collection of climate models, the researchers show that, for many places, the response of seasonal temperatures is approximately linear with global warming between 1.5C and 2C. But, in some regions, models simulate “substantially greater warming than is expected from linear scaling”, the study finds. East Asia is one example, the researchers note, as a decline in air pollution is expected to provide an additional boost to summer temperatures.

Crop yields exhibit known responses to droughts. However, quantifying crop drought vulnerability is often not straightforward. This study develops a physical crop drought vulnerability index through linking the drought exposure index (DEI) with the crop sensitivity index (CSI) in sub-Saharan Africa. Their findings show that southern African countries and some regions of the Sahelian strip are highly vulnerable to drought due to experiencing more water stress, whereas vulnerability in Central African countries pertains more to temperature stresses.

The turbulent surfaces of rivers and streams are natural hotspots of chemical exchange with the atmosphere. At the global scale, the exchange of gasses such as CO2 depends on the proportion of Earth’s surface that is covered by rivers and streams. Until recently this was unknown; this study shows that global river and stream surface area is 773,000 square kilometers (0.58% of Earth’s land surface), an area 44% larger than previous estimates. They found that rivers and streams likely play a greater role than currently represented in global carbon budgets.