The US Democrats running to be the party’s 2020 presidential candidate spent seven hours last night at a townhall meeting hosted by CNN, which saw them debate what they would do to tackle climate change. There is extensive media coverage of the event. The Guardian says the event “revealed a fundamental split [among the candidates] over how aggressively the US should tackle climate change”. Focusing on the current frontrunners in the polls, it adds: “Bernie Sanders painted an apocalyptic future wreaked by the climate crisis and pledged to wage war on the fossil fuel industry. A high-energy Elizabeth Warren urged optimism for building a better America and the former vice-president Joe Biden, who has a pitched a more moderate proposal, said he would push other nations to recommit to stronger action.” The Guardian has also published a detailed liveblog of the debate. The New York Times says that Biden was “caught off guard by a question on fundraiser’s fossil fuel ties”. Reuters also picks up on this moment in the debate, running with the headline: “At climate forum, Democratic presidential hopeful Biden defends gas-linked fundraiser.” In another piece about the event, the New York Times says that Pete Buttigieg called climate change a “kind of sin”. The paper has also produced a dedicated page which links to all its coverage of the debate. Before the debate began, a number of the candidates released their “climate plans”. The Guardian“compares their scores”, noting that Greenpeace ranks Bernie Sanders as offering the best. However, the Hill says that Biden currently has a 9-point lead over Warren among “climate-focused voters”, according to a new poll released by the Sierra Club. Meanwhile, president Donald Trump attempted to overshadow the debate by tweeting in advance a series of “facts” about climate change. The Washington Post says many of his claims were “flatly wrong”. Separately, Politico has a feature on why climate change could be a “problem” for the Democrats in 2020: “Climate change could be a winning long-term political issue for the Democrats – but in 2020, it could also threaten the party from inside and out.” CNN has a piece about the “growing power and anger of climate change voters”.

BusinessGreen reports that the UK’s chancellor Sajid Javid provided “slim pickings for the green economy” in his spending-round announcement yesterday, with “just £30m” being earmarked for “net zero projects”. BusinessGreen writes: “The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) was awarded a 2.2% increase in its resource budget for 2020-2021, with an extra £30m going towards new projects to accelerate the UK’s progress to net zero emissions. Ahead of today’s speech a coalition of climate, environment and health NGOs wrote to the chancellor calling for a doubling of green investment to at least £42bn to combat climate breakdown and deliver net zero by 2050. As such, campaigners and politicians were quick to criticise the amount of cash earmarked for the net zero, with Greenpeace’s head of politics Rebecca Newsom describing the spending round as falling ‘woefully short’ on addressing climate change.” Separately, BusinessGreen has published a list of the spending round’s “key green takeaways” and notes that Javid emphasised during his speech that the “challenge of decarbonisation is real”.

Several outlets cover Christine Lagarde’s appearance before the EU parliament’s economic and monetary affairs committee in which she sought approval to be the new head of the European Central Bank (ECB). Climate Home News says the veteran French conservative politician and former head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said the ECB should phase out climate-warming investments by preferring green bonds. She added that the bank should “move towards more green products” and pledged to “continue to look at that and how the ECB can be an actor in this”. She stressed, notes Climate Home News, that while the amount of carbon assets in the ECB’s portfolio “can’t change overnight”, a “move to a gradual transition to eliminate this type of assets” was “something that needs to be done”. The New York Times says Lagarde has “vowed to put climate change on the ECB’s agenda”.

Reuters has interviewed Ovais Sarmad, the deputy executive secretary of the UNFCCC, who warns that Asia’s heavy and expanding reliance on coal power risks cancelling out global progress towards preventing “catastrophic climate change”. He says: “There are certain countries in this region [Asia] still relying heavily on coal and fossil fuels as sources of energy, and in some areas that is growing. That’s a very, very serious problem because…all those gains that had been made in other parts of the world would be completely negated.” His comments come as officials of Asian nations have been meeting in Bangkok this week to discuss ways to tackle climate change.

“I’ve been a meteorologist at CNN since 1999. And for a long time I didn’t think that global warming gasses would overwhelm the earth enough to change its climate.” So begins a confessional comment piece by Chad Myers, who continues to say that “one big number ultimately changed my mind”. This epiphany came on 23 April 2013 when the atmosphere’s CO2 concentration passed 400ppm. “After that day I started attending climate conferences, and continued to consume more and more of the data coming in about climate change. I like to say that I didn’t go from denier to believer; I went from skeptic to scholar. And along the way I learned a lot about the climate crisis…Maybe you see the climate crisis as I do now. Maybe you need some more time to gather your own evidence and look closely at the facts. Whenever you’re ready, the next step is to figure out how you can start making a difference.”

There is continuing commentary across a number of publications spurred by the burning of the Amazon. CNN’s Nick Paton Walsh uses the global concern about the Amazon’s fate to argue that despite climate change being the “issue of our time”, it will be a “few decades” before humans do anything to truly change our consumption habits: “The most obvious resolution will come in a few decades, when the heat gets too much, crops fail, clean water becomes more valuable than oil, and the things you were warned about start to kill a lot of people. Then change will be inevitable, and unavoidable, and the number of people all hoping for the same life of wow will sadly drop to something more sustainable…What comes next is simply uglier, and most of us would rather not say that out loud.” In the Independent, Slavoj Zizek, a Slovenian philosopher, says: “In the Amazon, we see the ridiculous game of Europe blaming Brazil and Brazil blaming Europe. It has to stop. Ecological threats make it clear that the era of sovereign nation states is approaching its end – a strong global agency is needed with the power to coordinate the necessary measures. And does such the need for such an agency point in the direction of what we once called ‘communism’?”

A new review paper assesses the scientific literature on how climate change and variability is projected to affect coffee production. The review picks up on “a number of mostly negative impacts”, including “declines in coffee yield, loss of coffee-optimal areas with significant impacts on major global coffee-producing countries and growth in the distribution of pest and disease that indirectly influence coffee cultivation”. The majority of studies focused on the Americas and concentrated on Arabica coffee, the researchers note, which suggests “a broader spread of research is therefore required, especially for the large growing regions in Asia and for Robusta coffee, to support sustainable production of the global coffee industry”.

The oxygen provided to marine animals by plant life in coastal waters could help limit the damaging impacts of warming sea surface temperatures, a new paper suggests. While warming can cause “increasing animal metabolism and reducing oxygen availability” in marine ecosystems, animals living in close association with plant life in coastal areas can benefit from the oxygen they supply. Using a “unique high-frequency monitoring dataset” for the Red Sea, the researchers find that “oxygen supersaturation resulting from photosynthesis” closely parallels the daily day-night fluctuations of sea temperature changes. The study shows that supersaturation “extends the survival to more extreme temperatures of six species”, suggesting that it represents “an underestimated factor of resistance and resilience to ocean warming”.