The Times’s frontpage leads with the story that “Britain’s Chinese partner in the Hinkley Point power station deal is facing nuclear espionage charges in the US”. It adds: “China General Nuclear Power (CGN), a state-owned energy giant, is accused of leading a conspiracy to steal American power industry secrets to speed up the development and production of Chinese reactor technology…The allegations raise the prospect that China could one day build a nuclear power plant in Britain using stolen American technology. The claims will also heighten concerns over the [stalled] Hinkley Point deal with China.” The Guardian also reports the development. Separately, the Guardian carries a news that Peter Mandelson, the former Labour business secretary, has urged the government to go ahead with the Hinkley Point project, saying that after Brexit “we can’t be too fussy about who we do trade with”. Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, he said: “It would be commercial global suicide for China if they were to invest on the one hand and then try to mess around with other countries security on the next. I mean, nobody would trust China ever again; nobody would want to do business with Chinese investors ever again. The truth is that China would have far, far too much to lose if it were to start compromising other countries’ national security.” Meanwhile, Reuters reports that the Australian government has blocked the sale of the country’s biggest electricity network to the short-listed bidders, State Grid Corp of China and Hong Kong’s Cheung Kong Infrastructure Holdings, on national interest grounds.

A new study by the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado has found that the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991 blocked out the sun to such an extent that the Earth temporarily cooled and sea levels actually dropped for a while. This meant the eruption artificially masked the true effect of the melting ice on the sea level for the first two decades of satellite measurement – suggesting the underlying trend was a slowing down of the rate of increase, when in fact it should have been speeding up. But Mount Pinatubo effect has essentially worn off and the sea level is now starting to accelerate in line with original forecasts, according to the study, published in the journal Scientific Reports. The study is also covered by the Guardian, Wired, Daily Mail and the Washington Post.

Blustery weekend weather sent Scottish wind turbines into overdrive on Sunday, with wind energy generating the equivalent of all its electricity needs for the day. According to data released today by WWF Scotland, wind farms in the country produced 39,545MWh of electricity to the National Grid on Sunday – more than 2,000MWh more than the amount of electricity Scotland consumed that day. In total, wind turbines generated the equivalent of 106% of Scotland’s entire electricity needs on the day – helped in part by the lower weekend demand for electricity.

Donald Trump said yesterday that miners have one “last shot” in this election, cautioning that the coal industry will be nonexistent if Hillary Clinton wins the presidency this fall. Speaking in Abingdon, Va., in front of miners who held up bright yellow “Trump digs coal” signs, the GOP nominee continued his outreach to the workers and vowed to protect their jobs.

A new comment in the journal Nature contends that practices such as hunting, fishing and agriculture are still the biggest threats to biodiversity on Earth — and we need to be careful not to let our concern about climate change overshadow our efforts to address them. The Post explains that the the authors suggest there’s an increasing tendency to focus on climate change when discussing the challenges faced by biodiversity. “When thinking about climate change, it became obvious to me that we’ve got to sort out the current problems first,” said James Watson, an associate professor at the University of Queensland, director of science and research at the Wildlife Conservation Society and one of the comment’s authors. “Climate change is going to be a problem, but it’s not the greatest problem now.” The Nature commentary is also reported by the New Yorker,Huffington Post, Guardian and Deutsche Welle.

The chair of an Arctic Council working group claims that the Paris Agreement on climate change is not enough to stop climate change process in the Arctic region. “It is…clear that the pledges given at COP21 will not be sufficient to stop the ongoing climate change processes in the Arctic. Recent climate modelling shows that more stringent commitments are therefore needed,” Martin Forsius from the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP) said. The AMAP is a working group of the Arctic Council, which coordinates the activities of the eight Arctic states, namely Russia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden and the United States.

The BBC must not let on-air guests bamboozle viewers with inaccurate statistics, its watchdog has warned. The Telegraph chooses to pick out the single mention of climate change in the report in which the BBC Trust highlights the appearance of the actor Emma Thompson on BBC2’s Newsnight where she, according to the Telegraph, was “allowed to spout climate change inaccuracies without challenge”. More widely, the BBC Trust found that there were “many examples where statistics were used erroneously or in misleading ways by guests on programmes and were not challenged by presenters”.

Taxpayers face a big rise in the bill for cleaning up the first generation of nuclear power stations in Britain after the company that was wrongly awarded the contract raised its estimate by £1.6bn. Cavendish Fluor Partnership (CFP), a joint venture led by Babcock, the British defence and engineering company, has told the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) that the cost of cleaning up the 12 Magnox reactors will rise by 18% to more than £10bn, The Times has learnt.

A former Downing Street advisor who up until a few weeks ago was at the heart of Number 10’s energy and climate change efforts has set out a detailed vision for meeting the country’s carbon targets, fuelling speculation the strategy and its focus on nuclear, offshore wind, and electric vehicles, could provide the foundations for the government’s imminent decarbonisation plan. In an essay published on LinkedIn late last month, Stephen Heidari-Robinson offers his “personal reflections on decarbonisation in the UK”, providing an insight into the Cameron government’s thinking on a host of recent energy policy reforms and sketching out his preferred approach for meeting the UK’s fifth carbon budget. One green industry source said the 6,000-word essay was so revelatory about recent government thinking and potential future plans “I almost fell off my chair while reading it”

The veteran environmental campaigner and author gives his account of being closely monitored and filmed by America Rising Squared, an arm of the Republican opposition research group America Rising. “My days in public have often involved cameramen walking backward and videotaping my every move…I get, as well-meaning friends keep reminding me, that at some level it’s all tribute to our movement’s work in helping kill the Keystone pipeline and highlighting Exxon’s climate history, campaigns that cost the industry a lot of money. But I also understand that the simple fact that I’ve done nothing wrong is no defence against the destruction of a reputation.”

Climate Home looks at whether the carbon credit market that unpins the distribution of cookstoves is working as billed. “A recent field study, published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, looked at the first project in India approved for carbon offsets through the UN-backed Clean Development Mechanism. Its findings were not encouraging…The study found no statistically significant difference in wood use between families who used the new stoves and the control group.”

Jenkins joins virtually all other newspaper columnists writing on the topic in condemning the proposed, but paused Hinkley C deal: “May’s team should…shut up about security and discuss with China the constructive alternatives to Hinkley. These might include ways in which Chinese nuclear technology, not just money, might bear fruit in Britain, as in the new age of small-scale generators.”

In the second in his series of articles looking at the future of the UK’s energy system, Evans-Pritchard looks at storage: “The question for the British government as it designs a strategy fit for the 21st Century – and wrestles with an exorbitant commitment to Hinkley Point – is no longer whether [electricity storage] will ever be commercially viable, but whether the inflection point arrives in the early-2020s or in the late 2020s…Once storage costs approach $100 per kilowatt hour, there ceases to be much point in building costly ‘baseload’ power plants such as Hinkley Point…I will be writing about the economics of offshore wind in coming days but bear in mind that renewables generated 18pc of UK power last year, and this is expected to double by the late 2020s as wind and solar capacity reach 50 gigawatts (GW). Once the power can be stored for overnight use, there will be extended periods in the summer when no base-load is needed whatsoever.”

The chair of cognitive psychology at the University of Bristol looks at the “paranoid theories” espoused by Malcolm Roberts, a new Australian senator, to support his fervent rejection of climate science: “It might be tempting to dismiss his utterances as conspiratorial ramblings. But they can teach us a great deal about the psychology of science denial. They also provide us with a broad spectrum of diagnostics to spot pseudoscience posing as science.”

The eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991 is likely masking the pace of global sea level rise from human-caused climate change, a new study says. Since the start of the satellite observations in 1993, sea levels have increased by around 3mm per year. But this record began soon after the Pinatubo eruption, which temporarily cooled the planet, causing sea levels to drop. Now that the impact of Pinatubo have faded, barring another major volcanic eruption, the global sea level rise is likely to accelerate in the coming decade, the researchers conclude.

Being able to predict how many hurricane-strength tropical cyclones make landfall in the US each year has a huge public benefit, a new study says, but it is not simply a function of how many cyclones form in the first place. In fact, the conditions likely to steer hurricanes toward the US actually make tropical cyclone development less likely, and vice versa, the researchers find. They develop a new indicator for hurricane landfall risk based on a range of factors, including sea surface temperatures and wind patterns. This indicator captures 31% of year-to-year variability in landfalling hurricanes, the paper says, rather than just 20% for tropical cyclone count.