The board of energy company EDF is set to meet in Paris today to approve plans for an £18bn nuclear power station at Hinkley Point in Somerset. The project will take about eight years to build, with the first electricity due to be produced in 2025. It had originally planned to complete by next year but the scheme has been repeatedly delayed. The decision will pave the way for Greg Clark, the new business and energy secretary, to sign a 35-year subsidy deal with EDF, says the Telegraph. The contract guarantees EDF a price of £92.50 for every unit of electricity produced for 35 years. If the Government were to change its mind once the contract is signed, the UK could be liable to pay French state-controlled EDF billions of pounds in compensation. Hinkley Point is expected to provide 7% of the UK’s total electricity requirement, notes the BBC. The project’s revised timetable could still be highly optimistic, says the Guardian: “it will use the same reactor design as a plant being built in Flamanville, France, which is years behind schedule and more than three times over budget.”

A £344m plan to expand London City Airport has been given the green light by the Government, five months after a group of international investment funds purchased the site for more than £2bn. The project will enlarge City’s terminal and add seven new aircraft stands, lifting the airport’s capacity to 6.5m passengers each year by 2025, up from 4.3m this year. The expansion plan was previously blocked by Boris Johnson, the former London mayor, says the Times, but was formally approved by Chris Grayling, the transport secretary, and Sajid Javid, the communities and local government secretary. BusinessGreen reports comments from Hammond in a statement: “London City Airport’s ambitious growth plans will boost international connections, strengthening the City of London’s links to destinations across the world, and send a clear signal that Britain is open for business.” However, James Beard from WWF-UK criticises the “reckless and irresponsible” decision: “This announcement ignores the environmental costs of airports expansion, putting even greater pressure on our domestic and international commitments to tackle climate change.”

Environmentalists are again taking aim at the TransCanada – the company that proposed the Keystone XL pipeline – this time for its Energy East pipeline project. The 4,600km pipeline would carry crude oil from tar sands in Western Canada to the East Coast, where it would then be shipped to refineries along the Texas Gulf Coast. The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), Sierra Club and other environmental groups have published a report laying out their concerns about potential spills of tar sands in Canada and along the Atlantic coast. “What we have is a proposal to move nearly 300 super tankers down the eastern seaboard, and we don’t have the techniques and technology to contain and clean a spill of tar sands diluted bitumen should one happen,” said Anthony Swift, the Canada project director for the NRDC.

The family foundation built on the riches of John D Rockefeller’s Standard Oil has backed a $177.5m wind and solar power programme in Africa. The Rockefeller Brothers Fund is part of a consortium of investors supporting a scheme led by Mainstream Renewable Power of Ireland to build 1.3 gigawatts of carbon-free generating capacity in Africa by 2018. The decision marks the fund’s biggest move into green energy since announcing plans in 2014 to withdraw from fossil fuel investments and reallocate resources to green energy because of concern about climate change.

The world’s largest oil, coal, cement and mining companies have been given 45 days to respond to a complaint that their greenhouse gas emissions have violated the human rights of millions of people living in the Phillippines. In a potential landmark legal case, the Commission on Human Rights of the Philippines (CHR) has sent 47 major companies – including Shell, BP, Chevron, BHP Billiton and Anglo American – a 60-page document accusing them of breaching people’s fundamental rights to “life, food, water, sanitation, adequate housing, and to self determination”. The complaint calls for an official investigation into the human rights implications of climate change and ocean acidification and whether the companies are in breach of their responsibilities. However, the CHR is not a court and would have no power to fine the companies or force then to reduce emissions.

The European offshore wind industry has enjoyed a record six months of investment, according to new figures released today by trade body WindEurope. In the first six months of this year, wind projects attracted €14bn of investment, split across seven projects and financing a total of 3.7GW of new capacity. Around three-quarters of this investment – €10.4bn – went to the UK. However, the report also reveals that new installations across Europe fell by 78% compared to the same period last year, with 511MW installed across only two countries: Germany and the Netherlands.

Writing in the Guardian, executive director of Greenpeace UK John Sauven says “the spectre of [George Osborne’s] misguided energy policy could haunt Britain for decades, and at Hinkley in north Somerset, for millennia.” While cutting subsidies to solar power, Osborne “lavished new subsidies on the fossil fuel industry” and nuclear, Sauven argues. Hinkley Point is an “Olympic-sized subsidy swallower,” he says, with subsidies likely to rise to five times as big as expected through top-up payments. Sauven concludes: “Unless the new government sees sense and calls out their predecessor’s mistakes for what they are, two generations of UK consumers will be left footing the bill for the most expensive act of political face-saving in the history of British politics.” Elsewhere, Richard Black, director of the Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit looks at some of questions still outstanding on Hinkley, such as: “Can Britain afford it?”, “Do we need it?” and “What about the waste?”.

The FT’s “Undercover Economist”, Tim Harford, looks at the economic arguments behind whether we will ever stop using fossil fuels. “Overall, there is little prospect of running out of fossil fuels, and it seems unlikely that alternative energy sources will outcompete them,” Harford says. “And yet we must make the shift, or risk catastrophic climate change.” But there is some space for optimism, he notes: “Renewable energy sources are no longer impossibly costly. Nor is nuclear power, even though the costs have moved in the wrong direction. We cannot wait for the market to make the switch unaided — but the gap is no longer so wide that sensible policy cannot bridge it.” The focus of such a policy should be a carbon tax, he argues: “Such a tax would make renewable energy sources more attractive…Market forces can do the rest. Low carbon energy is not free — but it is worth paying for.”

Perhaps surprisingly, and despite the importance for international climate negotiations and for making reliable climate projections, there is currently no consensus on how much CO2 is taken up by the European terrestrial biosphere. A new study outlines the links that need to be forged across different methods, the estimates from which differ greatly for reasons that are not entirely understood. The authors also call for more in-situ stations, field campaigns, improvements in retrieval and inversion techniques, and new satellite missions.

Large scale afforestation, in a bid to bring down atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, could raise food prices by 80% by 2050 as competition for crop land increases. This is according to a new study, which also finds that the increase in shortwave radiation reflected back to space by the extra trees – known as the albedo – that would result from large scale tree planting can offset the cooling effect from carbon sequestration in boreal zones. The authors suggest the rise in food prices may be outweighed by an increase in incomes, and the effects could be buffered by more liberalised trade.