The operator of the UK’s largest power station has seen its share price slide after it posted a pre-tax loss of £83m in the first half of the year. The sliding share price came due to a loss in value of its coal assets after the government set a target to phase out use of the fossil fuel for power generation by 2025, alongside a £65m loss from currency hedging. However the company said it improved its earnings from renewables in the form of biomass power generation at its three converted former UK coal power units, reports BusinessGreen. Around 68 per cent of Drax’s UK power output now comes from biomass generation. Earnings from Drax’s biomass and coal power plant rose to £136.7m in the first half of this year, from £85.8m in the same period last year, The Times reports. Dorothy Thompson, Drax’s chief executive, revealed the company had submitted a planning application to convert one of its three remaining coal-fired units to gas. However Carbon Pulse notes the firm has as it shelved testing on a fourth coal-to-biomass conversion until next summer. Drax also announced it has appointed David Nussbaum, former chief executive of the World Wide Fund for Nature in the UK, to its board, the Financial Times reports. The Telegraph also has the story.

Global warming may be unleashing new sources of heat-trapping methane from layers of oil and gas that have been buried deep beneath Arctic permafrost for millennia. In a new study published in the Nature journal Scientific Reports, scientists used aerial sampling of the atmosphere to locate methane sources from permafrost in the Mackenzie River Delta in northwestern Canada. It found that deeply thawed pockets of permafrost are releasing 17% of all the methane measured in the region, even though the emissions hotspots only make up 1% of the surface area. The researcher shows another significant source of emissions that would result from the thawing of the tundra, the Independent, although how big an effect this new source of methane would be is “speculative”, according to the researchers. reports.

RSPB has lost a long-running legal challenge against plans to build a £2bn offshore windfarm in Scotland, which the conservationists said threatened puffins, gannets and kittiwakes. The Scottish government initially gave its consent to four major windfarms in the Firth of Forth and the Firth of Tay in 2014, but the RSPB launched a judicial review and won an initial court victory which a judge overturned in May. On Wednesday, the court of session ruled it was refusing the application for the case to be sent to the supreme court. Reuters also has the story.

Aardvarks may face massive population declines as the planet heats up due to global warming, the Daily Mail reports. In a study which monitored six members of the keystone species during a particularly severe drought in the Kalahari desert, five died of starvation because the ants and termites they eat need a certain amount of water in the soil to survive. When the researchers analysed the data from the sensors, they found that the animals had swapped their usual routines, going out of their burrows during the day to eat, rather than at night. Meanwhile the Guardian reports on a separate study which found rising temperatures are making it too hot for African wild dogs to hunt, with the number of their pups that survive plummeting. Separately, New Scientist reports on a polar bear study which found climate change may be driving more aggressive polar bears to areas where people live, as they become nutritionally stressed and go looking for food.

Once the engine of the Industrial Revolution and employer of nearly 1.2 million people, the fall of old king coal in the UK has been precipitous, writes Adam Vaughan in a piece examining coal’s “fall from grace”. While the fuel was generating over 40% of the UK’s electricity just five years ago, new analysis by Imperial College London reveals coal supplied just 2% of power in the first half of 2017. Meanwhile the 11-year-old UK Coal Forum will be wound down because it “no longer serves a purpose”, the new energy minister, Richard Harrington, said this week. The trajectory of UK coal production is also fast heading towards zero, down 75% between 2012 and 2016.

While oil prices could rally in the short to medium term, in the long run – by as early as the late-2020s – oil will start losing its lustre, writes Min Zhu, chair of the National Institute of Financial Research at Tsinghua University, Beijing, and a former deputy managing director of the IMF. This last age of oil will come as the transportation revolution displaces oil’s major role as a fuel for transportation, especially in motor vehicles, he argues. “The advent of EVs is a game-changer for the future of the oil market. As about one-half of the global oil market is road transportation (and about two-thirds in the US), the exclusive role of oil in fuelling transportation could vanish for good. In the aftermath, oil would become a widely available energy source competing with coal, natural gas, nuclear and renewables for electricity generation.” A Q&A in Bloombergmeanwhile answers the question of why electric cars are “everywhere except here, now”, pointing to the rapid projected rise of EVs despite relatively low sales today. “Battery-powered cars and gas-electric plug-in hybrids are poised to grow so fast that, by 2040, they’ll make up more than half of vehicles sold globally, according to BNEF forecasts.” But a separate feature in the Guardian explores how the success of the sector depends on better batteries.

Sometimes the worst case is the only thing that prompts us to get anything done, writes Farhad Manjoo. “I know this because I’ve studied the last time that governments, businesses and ordinary citizens joined together to combat a complex, man-made problem that threatened to wreak global havoc in the distant future….I speak, of course, of Y2K.” Manjoo says his favourite analysis of the effort to prevent a strange bug from making computers go haywire when the date flipped from 1999 to 2000 came from two Australian researchers, John Phillimore and Aidan Davison, who argued in a 2002 paper that fighting Y2K was an example of the “precautionary principle,” an idea well-known in the environmental movement.

The record summer temperature in France “could easily exceed 50 C by the end of the 21st century,” a new study suggests. Using a regional climate model, researchers simulated daily maximum temperatures under a business-as-usual scenario for five regions of France. The results show peak summer temperatures in France by 2100 could be 6-13C higher than during the second half of the 20th century.

Global emissions of air pollutants known collectively as “particulate matter (PM)” have not changed significantly between 1990 and 2010, a new study says, which shows “a strong decoupling from the global increase in energy consumption and, consequently, CO2 emissions.” The paper presents a new assessment of human-caused PM emissions for 1990-2010, which includes a number of previously unaccounted or often misallocated sources, such as kerosene lamps, gas flaring, diesel generators, and refuse burning. There are significantly different regional trends, the study finds, with a particularly strong increase in PM emissions in East Asia and Africa and a decline in Europe, North America, and the Pacific region.

A new study details the deaths of aardvarks in southern Africa during a recent drought, suggesting that the species will be at risk from local extinction as global temperatures rise. Researchers tracked six adult aardvarks in the semi-arid Kalahari during the hot, dry summer of 2013. Five of the study aardvarks and 11 other aardvarks at the study site died, the study says – most likely from starvation due to a lack of prey in the dry conditions. “Our results do not bode well for the future of aardvarks facing climate change,” the researchers conclude.