The price of Brent crude dropped to its lowest level in more than a decade, surpassing lows reached in the depths of the financial crisis. The “relentless rise in global production” looks set to swamp the market again in 2016. says the Financial Times. According to the International Energy Agency, oil stocks in the developed world have ballooned to almost 3bn barrels — or more than a month of global oil supplies. The price low follows the end of sanctions in Iran on Sunday, says Climate Home, which allows the the oil-producing country to start reopening trade links. Meanwhile, in the US, warm weather and surging energy production have pushed heating oil prices down to the lowest level since 2004 and natural gas prices to the lowest since 1999, says Reuters, and gasoline prices have dipped below $2 a gallon for the first time since 2009, reports the Hill. Such a low seasonal demand is coming at a critical time for fracking companies, says another Reuters article. Sharp drops in financial returns for drillers means “instead of a mentality of growth it’s now a mentality of survival,” says the vice-president of one company. The Washington Post and Reuters also cover the story.

Australia has approved the expansion of an existing coal port at Abbot Point near Bowen in north Queensland. The expansion project is key to the success of a coal mine to be built by India’s Adani Mining – the Carmichael project – which expects to export coal from the expanded port. The project, which will involve dredging one million cubic metres of spoil near the Great Barrier Reef, will see Abbot Point become one of the world’s biggest coal ports. The dredged spoil will be dumped in nearby industrial land, rather than in the Great Barrier Reef marine park as originally proposed, notes the Guardian. Even though the approval comes with a list of conditions, writes Graham Redfearn in a separate Guardian piece, “Australia’s suite of environmental laws continue to ignore probably the world’s greatest environmental threat – climate change caused chiefly from the burning of fossil fuels like coal”. Reuters also has the story.

Rising temperatures and drought conditions could trigger widespread die-off of coniferous trees, such as junipers and piñon pines, across the Northern Hemisphere, says a “troubling” new study. Using a combination of a five-year field experiment and model simulations, researchers estimate at least 50% of conifers could be lost within the Northern Hemisphere by 2100 if global carbon emissions stay high. The findings are particularly severe for the southwest US, for which 72% of the needleleaf evergreen forests would experience mortality by 2050, and nearly 100% by 2100. Elsewhere, conservationists are unveiling their “12 trees of Christmas”, in a bid to highlight the plight facing some of the world’s threatened conifers, reports the BBC.

Wild bees in the US have declined in many farming areas according to the first national effort to map their numbers. The study suggests that between 2008 and 2013, the numbers of wild bees decreased across almost a quarter of the US. A key element of the decline is the increased demand for biofuels, the study says. Crops such as corn do not require pollinators like wild bees, and the areas with the most serious reduction in bees have seen 200% increases in the amount of corn planted. Pesticides and diseases were cited as other factors behind the declines among the roughly 4,000 US species of wild bees, says Reuters.

The government has confirmed emissions from the UK’s power sector have fallen sharply in recent years. Carbon emissions from the country’s fleet of power stations fell 23% between 2012 and 2014 to 121 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent. The update – released late last week as part of a flurry of documents from the Department of Energy and Climate Change – says the energy supply sector was the single biggest contributor the reduction in UK emissions experienced in recent years.

Following the second tranche of the 14th onshore oil and gas licensing round, Greenpeace’s EnergyDesk has delved into the details of the clutch of companies hoping to frack in the UK. Many of the companies – such as “biggest winner” Ineos, and “new kids on the block” South Western Energy Limited and Nautical Petroleum Limited – have links to tax havens like Jersey, Guernsey and the Cayman Islands, EnergyDesk says.

The outdoor ice skating rink erected outside the Natural History Museum every Christmas is a “bizarre exercise for an organisation that aims to put climate change at the heart of its programme of public engagement with science,” says the Guardian. The museum hasn’t disclosed the carbon footprint of the rink, it says, but until the UK’s energy is 100% renewable, it will be contributing to climate change. Encouraging the public to minimise their own energy use is hard enough without this “conflicting message”, it argues.

The climate agreement delivered earlier this month in Paris is a “genuine triumph of international diplomacy,” yet it risks “being total fantasy,” says climate scientist Prof Kevin Anderson. Writing in Nature’s World View column, Anderson says limiting global temperature rise to well below 2C requires urgent and significant cuts in emissions, but the agreement rests on the assumption “that the world will successfully suck the carbon pollution it produces back from the atmosphere in the longer term”. Not so long ago, these technologies were only discussed as last-ditch contingencies, Anderson argues, “now they are Plan A.”

We’re missing a huge opportunity for tackling climate change by not considering food waste, argues Dr Richard Swannell, director of Sustainable Food Systems at the charity WRAP. “If lost and wasted food were a country it would be the world’s third largest greenhouse gas emitter, behind only China and the United States in the emissions table”, he says. An effective and ambitious focus on food waste-prevention offers huge benefits both for limiting global temperature rise and reducing the estimated $940bn worth of food wasted annually throughout the entire food supply chain.

Flood predictions fail to take into account the combined dynamics of expected socio-economic development and climate change according a new study. authors find absolute damage caused by flooding globally could increase 20 times end century. Southeast Asia faces particularly high risk though influence is dwarfed socioeconomic growth. In Africa far biggest factor when normalised GDP paper concludes.