In an often off-topic speech at a political rally in Phoenix on Tuesday, President Trump made a series of comments on what he calls “clean coal”. “We’ve ended the war on beautiful, clean coal, and it’s just been announced that a second, brand-new coal mine, where they’re going to take out clean coal — meaning, they’re taking out coal, they’re going to clean it — is opening in the state of Pennsylvania,” he told the rally. But Trump’s description of what clean coal actually is differs from that of experts. Carbon capture and storage, often known as “clean coal,” refers to methods of capturing carbon dioxide from coal-fired power plants. ‘”Clean coal’ refers to capturing the carbon dioxide after the coal is burned,” Matt Lucas, associate director of carbon-capture technology at the nonprofit Center for Carbon Removal, told the Washington Post. The New York Times and Think Progress also covers this story. Meanwhile, the Trump administration released a report yesterday urging actions to protect the “reliability and resilience” of the nation’s electric grid, a move that could lay the groundwork for future support of coal, The New York Times reports. The 187-page study, commissioned by Energy Secretary Rick Perry, recommends changes to wholesale electricity that could benefit existing coal plants.

There’s continued coverage of the peer-reviewed study that found Exxon knowingly misled the public about the danger climate change for decades, first reported in US papers yesterday. The analysis of nearly 200 documents found that four-fifths of Exxon scientific studies and internal memos acknowledged global warming was real and caused by humans. Yet, at the same time, a similar proportion of hundreds of paid editorials in major US newspapers cast deep doubt on these widely accepted facts. “Using social science methods, we found a gaping, systematic discrepancy between what Exxon said about climate change in private and academic circles, and what is said to the public,” co-author Dr Geoffrey Supran told AFP. As long ago as 1979, an internal ExxonMobil document discussed the “most widely held theory” that burning fossil fuels would cause “a warming of the Earth’s surface” with “dramatic environmental effects before the year 2050”, says the independent. In response, Exxon spokesman Scott Silvestri called the study “inaccurate and preposterous” and said the researchers’ goal was to attack the company’s reputation at the expense of its shareholders. “Our statements have been consistent with our understanding of climate science,” he said. Exxon is already facing a looming legal threat from US states and a group of shareholders over allegations that cast doubt on human-caused climate change since the 1980s, notes the Telegraph. The Hill also has the story.

More than 70% of the world’s countries, including the UK, US and China, could run entirely on renewable energy by 2050, a new study has claimed. Writing in the journal Joule, Stanford professor Mark Jacobson and his colleagues outline “energy roadmaps” that would allow 139 countries to switch to be powered by wind, solar and water by 2050. If the roadmaps were implemented, the switch to renewable power would allow humanity to avoid 1.5C of warming, prevent millions of premature deaths as a result of air pollution and create close to 24 million new jobs, the scientists argue. Jacobson writes on the importance of his team’s new findings in The New Scientist. “These roadmaps quantify the costs and benefits of transitioning all forms of energy for all purposes to electricity,’ he says. “By all forms of energy, I mean electricity, transportation, heating, cooling, industry and more.” In The Conversation, scientists Dénes Csala and Sgouris Sgouridis explore the importance of the new study. “It is likely that it will be criticised as it uses simplifying assumptions and still evades a detailed modelling of the three largest problems we face in the transition to sustainable energy: storage (especially large scale and long term), intermittency (both generation and demand) and trade (influenced by national security agendas just as much as by economics),’ they note. “Nevertheless, it can still be regarded as an agenda-setting, hypothetical description of the future, rather than a scientific pathway.”

The US National Institutes of Health has removed several references to climate change on its website, continuing a trend that began with Trump’s administration. A report by the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI) found five instances in which the term “climate change” was changed to simply “climate” on the National Institutes of Health (NIH) website. The references were altered on pages belonging to the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, NIH’s division dedicated to the study of the environment and its effects on human health. Links were also removed to a page dedicated to explaining the environmental impacts of climate change. Think Progress also covers the story and speaks to Christine Flowers, director of the Office of Communications and Public Liaison, who they say made the decision to alter the website’s language on climate change. Flowers says the changes were made to reflect new material being added to site, specifically on extreme weather. “In addition to the climate change information that is there, we also provide information on how disaster responders can defend their own health after extreme weather,” she said.

An interactive feature in the New York Times explores how climate change could be accelerating the rate of permafrost melt in the US state of Alaska. In Alaska, which is 350 miles below the Arctic Circle, scientists are starting to see changes in the frozen ground, the report says. Temperatures 65ft down into the permafrost have risen by 3C over the last few decades, scientists have found, and near-surface temperature changes have climbed from -8C to -3C. “Once this ancient organic material thaws, microbes convert some of it to carbon dioxide and methane, which can flow into the atmosphere and cause even more warming,” the report warns.

In a letter to Nature, professors David Smythe and Stuart Haszeldine – “sometime energy advisers to the UK government” – warn that fracking of unconventional oil and gas formations in the UK risks being classed as conventional hydrocarbon exploration. “This results from the government using legally binding definitions of unconventional oil and gas (UOG) resources and of high-volume hydraulic fracturing (HVHF, or fracking) that have little rational or scientific basis,” they write. “Current exploratory drilling in the UK’s Weald Basin is registered as ‘conventional’ because the hydrocarbon licensees are testing thin limestone layers in the shale and are not yet fracking,” they say. “Assuming the UK licensees start HVHF, they can then in principle claim that it is conventional hydrocarbon production by keeping the fracking fluid volume to less than 10,000 m3 per well,” – the write, “which would evade environmental obligations specified in the 2015 UK Infrastructure Act.”

Conservative MPs should embrace the rise of modern electric vehicles to help them “be relevant to urban professionals” and “lure back young voters”, Michael Liebreich writes in the Telegraph. He argues that “the electricity grid of the future will be centred on renewable energy, supplemented by natural gas, made flexible and resilient by power storage and digital control” and that a electric vehicle revolution is certain to follow. “Modern electric vehicles already outperform internal combustion cars,” he adds. “There is no doubt they will succeed: the cost of batteries has halved in the last five years, just as their energy density has doubled.”

Climate change could cause an increase in days with the potential for “unmanageable” wildfires in Canada’s forests, a new study says. Using climate models and five scenarios of future greenhouse gas emissions, researchers assess to what extent Canadian fire management resources can effectively suppress fires in future. The results suggests that the proportion of days in the fire season with the potential for unmanageable fires could more than double in some regions in northern and eastern boreal forest, the paper finds.

ExxonMobil contributed to advancing climate science through its scientific publications, but promoted doubt about it in paid, editorial-style advertisements in The New York Times, a new study finds. Researchers analysed 187 climate change communications from ExxonMobil, including peer-reviewed and non-peer-reviewed publications, internal company documents, and “advertorials” in The New York Times. They found that 83% of peer-reviewed papers and 80% of internal documents acknowledge that climate change is real and human-caused, yet only 12% of advertorials do so, with 81% instead expressing doubt. “Given this discrepancy, we conclude that ExxonMobil misled the public,” the researchers conclude.

Americans with more general education and greater science knowledge tend to express polarised views on climate change that relate to their political beliefs, a new study suggests. The researchers analysed the US General Social Survey to identify the factors that influence the views of people with high levels of science education and science literacy. They find that beliefs are correlated with both political and religious identity for stem cell research, the Big Bang, and human evolution, and with political identity alone on climate change. These patterns suggest that “scientific knowledge may facilitate defending positions motivated by nonscientific concerns,” the researchers conclude.