Deb Haaland has been confirmed as Joe Biden’s “secretary of the interior”, the New York Times reports, and has “made history” as the first Native American to lead a cabinet agency. Haaland will oversee “about 500m acres of public land, federal waters off the US coastline, a huge system of dams and reservoirs across the Western US and the protection of thousands of endangered species”, the newspaper notes. It adds that Republicans opposed Haaland’s confirmation due to her history of opposing oil-and-gas exploration, plus her role in public debates on climate change, energy policy and racial equality. According to the paper, Haaland is “expected to quickly halt new drilling, reinstate wildlife conservation rules, rapidly expand wind and solar power on public lands and waters, and place the Interior Department at the centre of Mr Biden’s climate agenda”. It adds that “among the first and most contentious items on Ms Haaland’s to-do list will be enacting Mr Biden’s campaign pledge to ban new permits for oil and gas projects on public lands”. In a recent interview, Haaland told the Guardian that she would “move climate change priorities, tribal consultation and a green economic recovery forward” as secretary of the interior. Haaland is a supporter of proposals such as the Green New Deal and opposed the Keystone XL pipeline, the Independent notes. The Washington Post adds that she was confirmed by a 51-40 vote in the Senate, including four Republican votes. Haaland’s confirmation and climate stance are also reported in Bloomberg, Reuters, the Hill and Al Jazeera.

The Washington Post covers Michael Regan’s first interview as administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under the subheading: “In his first interview as the nation’s top environmental official, Michael Regan says he is focused on restoring morale at the agency, combatting climate change and lifting up communities burdened by pollution.” According to the paper, Regan says he will review the Trump administration’s rollback of tailpipe emission rules for new trucks and cars and look at their attempt to revoke California’s authority to set its own fuel-efficiency standards for automobiles. According to the New York Times, Regan has confirmed that the agency is “preparing new regulations on the electricity sector in an effort to meet president Biden’s aggressive climate change goals”, although he was not “not specific” on the new policies that the EPA will take. Reuters reports that one of Regan’s first actions as head of the EPA was an announcement that “power plants in a dozen states [will be required] to cut their smog emissions starting this year as part of an effort to help areas of the country that are downwind of polluting industry”. This comes as Bloomberg reports that the “record-breaking” North American wildfires in 2020 made the area “the only region in the world where air quality was worse than during the previous year”. The outlet notes that 35% of cities in the US saw PM2.5 levels exceeding WHO air quality standards in 2020, up from 21% the previous year, adding that 77 of the worlds 100 most polluted cities in September 2020 were in the US.

In other US news, an exclusive in Reuters reports that Congress is “investigating a multibillion-dollar subsidy for chemically treated coal that is meant to reduce smokestack pollution, after evidence emerged that power plants using the fuel produced more smog not less”.

The series of exceptionally dry and hot European summers since 2014 was “the most extreme for more than 2,000 years”, the Guardian reports. This is according to new research in Nature Geoscience, which “analysed tree rings dating as far back as the Roman empire to create the longest such record to date”, the outlet adds. It notes the droughts were caused by changes in the position of the jet stream and of air circulation patterns over Europe – “probably” driven by climate change. The study found “gradual drying of the summer climate in central Europe over the last two millennia, before the recent surge”, according to the outlet. MailOnline adds that carbon and oxygen isotopes in the European oak trees were used to reconstruct the summer climate over the past 2,110 years.

In other research news, the Washington Post covers new research which indicates that “the biggest reservoir of ice in the Northern Hemisphere can collapse due to relatively small increases in temperature over a long period of time”. It adds that the finding is based on a soil sample containing plant remnants that was taken from the bottom of an ice core drilled during a “failed Cold War effort to hide nuclear missiles beneath Greenland’s ice”. Inside Climate News also covers the story, reporting that the plant remains show that “most of Greenland’s ice sheet melted about 1 million years ago, in a climate like today’s”.

Meanwhile, a separate piece in the Guardian covers a report from the International Renewable Energy Agency, which finds that renewable electricity production “needs to grow eight times faster than the current rate to help limit global heating”. The outlet reports that a total investment £131tn into renewables will be required by 2050, adding that fossil fuels use will need to be limited to 10% of all energy consumed by then. A piece in MailOnline reports that February 2021 was the coldest February in seven years, due to the La Nina event seen this year. And Sky News covers new research which finds that “the melting of the world’s mountain glaciers could be releasing damaging carbon emissions into the atmosphere and accelerating climate change”.

Volkswagen (VW) will build or open six battery factories across Europe by 2030, reports the Financial Times, “tightening the carmaker’s grip on the supply chain for electric vehicles (EVs) as it embarks on an ambitious sales drive”. In its strategy announced yesterday, VW said the plants will have a combined capacity to produce batteries for almost 5m cars per year, the paper says. The push will cost around $29bn and would make VW and its partners the world’s second-largest cell producer after China’s Contemporary Amperex Technology Co, says Bloomberg. It also sets up VW to take the lead in EVs from Tesla, says the Daily Telegraph, “with the German company planning to add 50 battery vehicles to its line-up by 2030”. It adds: “VW said it plans to build 26m all-electric cars by 2030, up from the 230,000 it sold in 2020. By comparison, Telsa sold about 500,000 cars last year.” The paper also carries the comments of VW chief executive Herbert Diess, who says: “E-mobility has won the race. Our goal is to secure a pole position in the global scaling of batteries.” VW also announced that it is “teaming up with local energy players to ensure that battery vehicles can plug in when they are on the road”, reports the Times. The paper explains: “VW is launching investment joint ventures with BP in the UK and in Germany – where BP trades as Aral – and with Iberdrola in Spain and Enel in Italy to produce public fast-charging networks, the sort that can provide 100 miles’ worth of battery charge in about 10 minutes.”

In related news, the Daily Telegraph reports that EVs are now included into the formula for calculating inflation in the UK, which is a signal that they “have gone mainstream”. The Guardian reports that Tesla “lobbied the UK government to raise taxes on petrol and diesel cars in order to fund bigger subsidies for electric vehicles, alongside a ban on hybrids”. The i newspaper reports on a trial scheme in Coventry that offers car owners £3,000 in travel vouchers to scrap polluting older vehicles. And, in the US, Yale Environment 360 says that “driven by GM, Tesla, and the Biden administration, the US is now poised to press ahead in the transformation to EVs”.

In other transport news, BBC News reports on new research showing that “jet fuel from food waste has the potential to massively reduce carbon emissions from flying”. Researchers in the US have “found a way of turning this waste into a type of paraffin that works in jet engines”, the outlet explains, which could cut “greenhouse gas emissions by 165% compared to fossil energy”. This figure “comes from the reduction in carbon emitted from airplanes plus the emissions that are avoided when food waste is diverted from landfill”, the outlet notes. At the same time, the Times reports that UK government ministers are “planning ‘a new era of guilt-free flying’ with a competition being launched today for projects to make low-emission jet fuel from waste”. The paper explains: “Companies will be able to bid for a share of a £15m pot to develop ‘first-of-a-kind production plants’ that make fuel from household rubbish, waste wood, excess electricity and flue gases from industry…Grant Shapps, the transport secretary, will give details of the competition at a meeting of the Jet Zero Council, a partnership between the government and industry which seeks to ‘fast-track zero-emission flight’.” And in the Times Red Box, Robert Courts – Conservative MP and aviation minister – writes about the role the Royal Air Force is playing in reducing aviation emissions.

And, finally, the Times reports that “the number of electric scooters operating on urban streets [in the UK] is set to soar by as much as two-thirds in the coming months because of huge demand for the devices”.

The Washington Post carries a comment piece by John Bolton – national security advisor under Donald Trump – discussing the high-level meeting between the American and Chinese administrations due to take place later this week. Bolton says that in the meeting, US secretary of state Antony Blinken and national security adviser Jake Sullivan will explain to senior Communist Party Politburo member Yang Jiechi and foreign minister Wang Yi “how the new team ‘intends to proceed at a strategic level,’ conveying its interests and values, and its concerns with Chinese activities”. Bolton lists Beijing’s “transgressions” against the US, and says that “despite the administration’s denials, zeal for a climate deal may be first on the list.” He adds that Blinken and Sullivan “must stress to the Chinese that Biden’s policy will differ fundamentally from his predecessors”, noting that US public opinion towards Beijing turned negative due to its actions around Covid-19. The US today “cannot afford to revive former president Barack Obama’s blinkered acquiescence in China’s conduct”, and must recognise China as “as at least an adversary, if not an enemy”. Bolton concludes the piece by noting that the meeting “will not resolve any major issues”, but that “if Blinken and Sullivan emphasise that Biden is developing a coherent strategy to resolutely oppose China’s objectionable behaviour, that alone would be a vital difference from the past 12 years”.

Meanwhile, an editorial in the South China Morning Post says that northern China has not been “so badly affected by sand and dust storms” for a decade. It says that climate change is “complicating matters” by raising temperatures, lowering rainfall and strengthening winds, and that air quality readings have “soared off the scales”. The paper notes that 27% of China’s land is currently considered to be desert and that the government has planted over 66bn trees since 1978 to shrink deserts and create a “great green wall” of trees to trap the dust. It notes that China aims to have 30% forest cover by 2050 and is on target with a current coverage of 22%. However, it notes that tree species have to be “carefully considered for the amount of water they use”, adding that large parts of China are “becoming more barren as a result of water scarcity”. The editorial concludes by asking if climate change could “too easily derail efforts to stop the spread of deserts and arid land”. On the same topic, a news feature in the New York Times says that the Chinese government “has made great strides in reducing China’s pollution”, but that northern China is experiencing “the largest and strongest dust storm in a decade” due to a combination of the post-covid industrial rebound, the impact of climate change on deserts in northern China, and a late winter storm. The policy director of Greenpeace China – Li Shuo – says in an interview that the storm was “the result of land and ecological degradation in the north and west of Beijing”.

In other China news, Reuters reports that China has “launched a crackdown on illegal sand mining operations on the Yangtze river, which have made large parts of central China more vulnerable to drought”. In its coverage of the story, the Hill includes a tweet from Li: “Beijing is what an ecological crisis looks like. After two weeks of smog and static air, strong wind carries a sand storm in, sending air quality index off the chart”. And, finally, the Global Times reports that Chinese leader Xi Jinping has “stressed efforts to promote the regulated, healthy and sustainable development of the platform economy and incorporate the peaking of carbon emissions and carbon neutrality into the overall layout of building an ecological civilisation”.

And, in other geopolitical commentary, UK prime minister Boris Johnson writes in the Times: “At the COP26 summit in Glasgow the UK is leading the world in the campaign to reduce CO2 emissions and arrest the overheating of the planet. Britain was the first major western country to commit to the goal of net zero by 2050 and it is wonderful — and moving — to see how other countries are now pledging themselves to the same goal. Those pledges will be hollow, however, without serious commitments, mainly to the use of new technology, that will make those reductions happen. Again, we in the UK are taking those big and bold steps, not only because it is good for the world but because these green technologies, from wind to hydrogen to carbon capture, have the potential to create hundreds of thousands of high-wage, high-skill jobs in Britain.”

“Germany’s Green party woke up yesterday to the smell of power”, according to an editorial in the Times. The piece says that the Green party “seemed to many Germans for decades to be the harbinger of revolution”, but that as environmental issues are now appearing “mainstream and urgent”, the Greens “seem to be an eligible partner again”. It adds that “Sunday’s elections showed that the Greens have momentum”, noting that the party displaced the Social Democrats (SPD) in the polls and is now the second largest party nationwide. According to the piece, the incumbent CDU and SPD parties are “showing signs of fatigue”, having “come under fire” for their handling of covid. It adds that “environmental choices are just as sticky”, noting that Angela Merkel “shocked her country by withdrawing Germany from a long-term nuclear future” following the Fukashima incident and later “faced dilemmas about the German use of coal and the state subsidies for renewable energy”, before committing to “a politically destructive dependency on Russian gas”. According to the piece, it is “not clear that the Greens would make a better job of it”. The piece concludes that green parties are drawing support from across age groups, and that “the greening of Europe appears to reflect a new sobriety about the seriousness of the challenges ahead”.

In a new series entitled “America’s race to zero emissions”, Guardian journalists Oliver Milman, Alvin Chang and Rashida Kamal explore how the country will have to change over the next 30 years in order to reach net-zero emissions by 2050. The authors report that the “fading era of coal” would need to end completely in the next decade and that use of oil and gas will need to be “severely scaled back”. To replace the lost energy, the piece says that an extra 300GW of both solar and wind will be needed by 2030, and that supply will need to increase five-fold from todays transmission capacity by 2050. It adds that this would require one tenth of all land to be covered in turbines and panels. According to the piece, “$25bn will need to be spent per decade” on EV charging points by the 2030s. It adds that half of all cars sold will need to be battery-electric before the “total abandonment” of the internal combustion engine by 2050. 130m US home will also need to be fitted with heat pumps, according to the outlet. Finally to offset leftover emissions, the US will need to construct “a vast restoration of nature’s carbon storage – soils and trees” alongside 1,000 industrial carbon capture facilities, the piece says. It concludes by talking about jobs, noting that “Some jobs will be lost, such as those in the coal, oil and gas sectors, although the Biden administration is banking on these being more than offset by many more jobs emerging in wind, solar and grid upgrades”.

Meanwhile, the New York Times runs an opinion piece by contributing writer Margaret Renki, who discusses some of the positive climate stories she has seen. This include the rise of renewable energy, the rehabilitation of endangered species, conservation non-profits winning in courts, and the fact that according to Renki “people are waking up”.

New research assesses the contribution of human-caused climate change to a record-breaking summer rainfall and temperature event in South China last year. Compared with past climate, the occurrence risk of an event reaching or exceeding the 2020 event under similar atmospheric circulation conditions “increased by 5.1 times under the present climate, 80% of which can be attributed to climate change”, the study says. It adds that hot events similar to 2020 “cannot occur under past climate”.

A new perspective paper discusses “a series of technological options to bring about change in agriculture for delivering food security and providing multiple routes to the removal of CO2 from the atmosphere”. These technologies include enhanced weathering, agronomy technologies to increase soil organic carbon and “high-yielding resource-efficient crops” that would free up land that is less suited for intensive cropping for “land use practices that will further increase carbon storage”, the authors say.

The sequence of European summer droughts since 2015 is “unprecedented in the past 2,110 years”, a new study suggests. Analysing carbon and oxygen isotopes from tree-rings taken from “21 living and 126 relict oaks”, the researchers reconstruct central European summer hydroclimate from 75BC to AD2018. The findings show that the recent series of droughts “is probably caused by anthropogenic warming and associated changes in the position of the summer jet stream”.