China’s national emissions trading scheme (ETS) will be officially launched on 19 December, reports Climate Home, citing a document from the country’s National Development Reform Commission. The scheme will initially cover only the power sector, scaling back the original plan for eight sectors to take part, including chemicals, building materials, metals and aviation. The ETS will still become the world’s largest carbon market, Climate Home adds. China has asked local authorities to start collecting carbon emissions data from industrial plants for the 2016-17 year, reports Reuters, in anticipation of the ETS launch.

The final version of tax reform legislation being negotiated by US lawmakers will preserve key renewable energy tax credits that were at risk of being removed, Reuters reports, citing “congressional and business sources”. The wind power production tax credit and a $7,500 electric vehicle tax credit will now be retained, it says, while the renewable energy industry is “awaiting details” on how the deal will address problems created by the “Base Erosion Anti-Abuse Tax (BEAT)”, which had threatened to make tax credits like that for wind less valuable. A final vote on the package is expected next week. Bloomberg also has the story.

Oil major BP is to invest $200m in Europe’s largest solar power developer, reports the Financial Times, which calls the move a “return to a sector from which [BP[ withdrew six years ago.” BP will buy a 43% stake in Lightsource, a London-based firm with 2 gigawatts (GW) of operational solar farms in the UK and another 6GW of projects under development in Europe, the US and Asia. It will be renamed “Lightsource BP”. A BP executive tells the FT the firm has learnt from past failures and is entering a more attractive part of the solar market as a developer and manager of solar farms, rather than low-margin solar panel manufacturing.

A new collection of papers published on Wednesday in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society looks at 27 extreme weather events from 2016 and found human-caused climate change was a “significant driver” for 21 of them, reports the New York Times. It describes five events made more likely by climate change, including last year’s record global temperature, coral bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef, drought in Africa, wildfires in North America and a warm “blob” in the Pacific. The article adds: “Climate attribution remains easier for some weather events than others. Temperature records are the simplest to link to climate change. But droughts — which are influenced by a complex interplay of temperature, precipitation and soil moisture — can be trickier to connect to warming trends. And hurricanes are more difficult still, because they occur so rarely.”

The UK’s Office for Nuclear Regulation has given the green light to Hitachi’s Advanced Boiling Water Reactor (ABWR) design, which the firm hopes to build at Wylfa on Anglesey. The design has now passed the “generic design assessment” stage of the regulatory process, says Energy Live News. The approval marks a “crucial step forward” after a five-year regulatory process, reports the Guardian. It adds that attention will now turn to how the Horizon plant will be financed. Hitachi expects the government to outline how it will help finance the project, in the first half of 2018, reports Reuters. “We are having positive discussions with the government…which we hope will result in an outline for a deal in the first half of next year,” a spokesman for Horizon tells Reuters.

It should be an “easy” decision for federal regulators to reject US energy secretary Rick Perry’s plan to subsidise coal and nuclear plants, ostensibly to protect grid “resiliency”, says an Economist editorial. “The rationale behind Mr Perry’s proposal is weak; just 0.00007% of power cuts in 2012-16 were caused by problems with fuel. In emergencies the biggest risk to grids is not power generation at all, but the poles and wires along which electricity flows…The politics of the proposal are also suspect; it looks like a boondoggle to coal bosses who backed president Donald Trump’s election campaign. Worse, it threatens to reverse decades of energy deregulation.” Rather than support coal and nuclear, regulators should promote “market-friendly mechanisms to ensure stability of supply” in the face of increasing variable output from wind and solar, the editorial says. It concludes: “America has never had so many options for making electricity reliable, cheap and green. Throwing subsidies at the dirtiest fuel of the lot is not one of them.”

A “critical flaw” in EU renewable energy plans will “accelerate climate change”, write a high-powered group of authors including former IPCC vice-chair Jean Pascal van Ypersele and former UK chief scientist Prof Sir John Beddington. The group say trees cut down and burnt for energy should not count as renewable and will “increase global warming for decades to centuries, even when wood replaces coal, oil or natural gas”. They write: “At a critical moment when countries need to be ‘buying time’ against climate change, this approach amounts to selling the world’s limited time to combat climate change under mistaken claims of improvement.” The authors say that proposed safeguards fail to address their concerns and that renewable energy status should be restricted to wood wastes and residues. They conclude: “the fate of much of the world’s forests is literally at stake.”

“Over the past two decades, Republicans have grown increasingly doubtful about climate change, even as Democrats have grown increasingly convinced that it’s happening and is caused by humans,” write Nadja Popovich and Livia Albeck-Ripka in the New York Times. In a series of maps, they illustrate the “greater nuance in partisan climate opinions across the [US]” revealed by recent new research. The findings include that most Republicans think climate change is happening, but not caused by humans, yet a majority still support climate policies, particularly funding for clean energy research.

The One Planet Summit in Paris on 12 December was one of a “year-long series of climate get-togethers, some of them initiatives by green-minded politicians and some of them part of the Paris [climate] deal,” writes Economist environment correspondent Jan Piotrowski. “All this summitry provides an opportunity for politicians and philanthropists to make further commitments. It also puts pressure on laggards and reminds the public of a problem that is unfolding so slowly that is easy to ignore. But unless political leaders like Messrs [French president Emmanuel] Macron, [Chicago mayor Rahm] Emanuel and [California governor Jerry] Brown redouble their efforts, the prospect of keeping global warming to under 2C looks poor.”

“Over the past three decades, wind speeds in the strongest storms have increased more rapidly in some areas,” writes Alexandra Witze in Nature News. A new study suggests the type of rapid wind speed progression behind Hurricane Maria in September has become more pronounced over the past three decades, in the central and eastern tropical Atlantic, but not the western Atlantic.

“No place is more likely than this one to benefit from President Trump’s promise to make the United States a dominant energy force in the world, or more likely to be disappointed if the promise is not kept,” writes Clifford Krauss in the New York Times. In an extended feature, Krauss meets the people of Converse County, Wyoming, home to one the country’s largest coal mines, its largest uranium facility, four large windfarms and thousands of oil and gas wells. He writes: “The greater good, in the view of local residents from energy executives to roustabouts, depends on slashing environmental regulations, including restrictions on pipeline building that could deliver more Wyoming oil and gas to faraway markets. They applaud the lifting of the moratorium on coal leasing on federal lands. Many approve of Mr. Trump’s rejection of the Paris climate accord, and the administration’s move to unwind President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which was designed to control power plant emissions.”

Ocean biology affects solar radiation absorbed by the upper ocean, and can help modulate El Niño events. An ocean biology was used to model chlorophyll in the ocean. They found that the portion of solar radiation that penetrated the bottom of the ocean mixed layer was significantly affected by changes in chlorophyll concentrations in the western-central equatorial Pacific. During El Niño events lower chlorophyll concentrations acts exert a cooling effect, while during La Niña events high chlorophyll results in additional warming. This serves to modulate the effects of both El Niño and La Niña events.

A new global land temperature record since 1880 has been developed, using a new statistical method to deal with areas of missing data. They find warming slightly greater than other groups since 1900, particularly during the period after 1979. From 1979 to 2014 they found around 18% faster warming than prior estimates by NASA and Berkeley Earth. In the early 20th century (1923–1950), warming occurred mainly in the mid-high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere, whereas in the most recent decades (1977–2014), warming occurred broadly across the global land surface. The study produced a new database with greater coverage and less uncertainty that will improve the understanding of climate dynamics on the Earth since 1880, especially in isolated areas and early periods.