Eight Republican lawmakers helped pass an extension to California’s five-year-old carbon market in a vote on Monday night, reports the LA Times. The scheme will now run until at least 2030, rather than ending in 2020, reports the Associated Press. Republican votes “played a deciding factor in both houses [of the California legislature] providing one critical vote in the state Senate and seven in the Assembly,” says the Wall Street Journal, though several other outlets note that most Republicans did not support the plan. The cap-and-trade package is the centrepiece of plans to meet California’s 2030 climate goal, a 40% reduction on 1990 levels. Reuters adds that previous attempts to extend the scheme had met opposition from liberal Democrats, “who felt it did not go far enough and moderates concerned about the impact on business.” Carbon Pulsealso has the story.

The raw materials needed to build clean energy infrastructure could create environmental challenges, reports the Financial Times, covering a World Bank report. It points towards certain metals, including lithium, and rare earth elements, arguing that proper management of their extraction is required

Fast-moving waves pushing warm water towards ice shelves are helping break up the Antarctic, says the Independent, reporting new research in Nature Climate Change. The Mail Online also covers the research, picking out its findings on the high winds pushing warm water towards the Antarctic. Meanwhile the BBC reports on the fate of the giant iceberg A-68, which recently broke off the continent’s Larsen C ice shelf.

UK Power Networks, which delivers electricity to 18m people in London and the southeast of England is asking for the right to switch off or turn down electric car chargers, reports the Times. The firm wants the powers as a last resort to avoid power cuts, the paper says. It notes findings from National Grid, covered by Carbon Brief last week, showing electric vehicles could significantly increase peak power demand if they are unmanaged. The Times adds that industry and government plan to encourage smart charging to shift the demand to off-peak times. Time-of-use tariffs, a more sophisticated version of “Economy 7” cheap nighttime rates, are also expected to help balance supply and demand, it says. In the Daily Telegraph, businessman Richard Branson is interviewed about his electric car racing team, which uses “technology he believes will make petrol-run cars obsolete.” Meanwhile in the US, E&E News reports that power utilities are increasingly working with carmakers, regulators and lawmakers to boost sales of electric vehicles. It cites utilities in California and Vermont that have offered customers $450 to $1,200 if they buy a plug-in electric car

Lenders could offer larger mortgages on homes that are energy efficient and cheap to run, reports the Guardian, covering new government-funded research. The move could raise the value of well-insulated homes, it suggests, encouraging efforts to improve home energy efficiency. BusinessGreen also has the story.

Some £8.7bn of pledged UK international aid money is lying unused, according to the National Audit Office, reports the Times. The auditor says the amount, which has doubled in two years, risks undermining the credibility of the government’s commitment to spend 0.7% of national income on aid. It also notes that departments, including the then-Department for Energy and Climate Change, have been spending most of their aid budgets in the final quarter of each year. The Daily Mail and others also have the story.

Recent stronger economic growth in China has been driven by a “massive credit boost”, writes Lauri Myllyvirta at Greenpeace EnergyDesk. This stimulus has benefitted construction and heavy industry, which, combined with a poor year for hydropower has seen Chinese coal consumption rebound, after falling last year, he writes. It has also reversed gains in air quality, “creat[ing] pressure for fresh cuts to coal consumption and stronger regulation.” Myllyvirta adds: “This kind of heavy-industry led growth is a deviation from Beijing’s longer-term economic strategy of shifting to growth driven by services and high-tech sectors…the efforts to diversify the economy away from smokestack industries will most likely resume next year.”

People should stop obsessing over how personally green they live and start collectively taking on corporate power, argues Martin Lukacs in the Guardian. He writes in response to a recent study that suggested the single-best choice individuals could take to tackle climate change was to have one child less. He writes: “These pervasive exhortations to individual action — in corporate ads, school textbooks, and the campaigns of mainstream environmental groups, especially in the west — seem as natural as the air we breath. But we could hardly be worse-served. While we busy ourselves greening our personal lives, fossil fuel corporations are rendering these efforts irrelevant.”

European birds that migrate for the winter might not be able to speed up their return migration to match the earlier arrival of spring, a new study finds. Analysis of 49 tracking studies suggests that variations in migration speed were mainly determined by stopovers the birds took for feeding. Even reducing stopover time by half would only see the birds arrive two days earlier, which “seems insufficient to adjust to ongoing climate change,” the researchers say.

Balancing out wind and solar power capacity across Europe would help maintain average generation and increase minimum output, a new study says. The researchers assessed how long-lasting weather patterns across Europe can affect wind power output across several countries at once. With Europe-wide collaboration, increasing wind power in countries influenced by different weather patterns from Western Europe (e.g. in the Balkans) and ramping up solar capacity would eliminate variations in power output, the study concludes.

Strengthening winds in East Antarctica are driving the rapid rate of melt of ice shelves along the West Antarctic Peninsula, a new study suggests. The research finds that winds in East Antarctica can generate sea-level disturbances that propagate around the continent via a type of ocean wave known as a “Kelvin wave”. When these waves reach the West Antarctic Peninsula, they push warm water from the Antarctic Circumpolar Current towards the large ice shelves along the shoreline. The changes in the Antarctic coastal winds might themselves be related to climate change, the researchers say.