With the UK on track for a hung parliament following the biggest electoral upset in a generation, the green economy is readying itself for a period of political instability, reports BusinessGreen. A hung parliament threatens further delays to the publication of a new Clean Growth Plan detailing how the UK will meet its post 2020 emissions targets, while energy industry will also have to wait to see how controversial plans from both the Conservatives and Labour for a price cap play out. DeSmog UK also takes a look at what a hung parliament means for energy and climate issues, including Brexit, fracking and the North Sea.

The French presidency has launched a website to encourage international scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs to move to France following U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris climate agreement. The website – makeourplanetgreatagain.fr – is is part of a public relations drive by Macron to capitalise on Trump’s decision to withdraw from the climate change deal and to distance himself from his US counterpart, reports Politico. While some questioned the site’s purpose beyond offering a portal for links to French universities, a spokesperson said it was “a signal sent to the rest of the world…France wants to lead the fight against climate change and we want to attract people who share that aspiration.” BusinessGreen also has the story.

Amid global condemnation of Donald Trump’s decision to pull the US out of the Paris Agreement, energy secretary Rick Perry said on Thursday that America and China have “extraordinary opportunities” to work together on clean energy. In a meeting with Chinese Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli at a clean energy conference in Beijing, Perry cited nuclear energy and carbon capture among the areas where the two countries could work together. California Gov. Jerry Brown, who also attended the Beijing conference, told The Associated Press that Trump’s move would ultimately prove only a temporary setback because China, European countries and individual U.S. states will step in to fill the gap.

Ski resorts across the US have united to condemn Donald Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris Agreement. Vail Resorts and Aspen Skiing Company – two of the companies that manage the majority of the country’s ski resorts – were among over 1,200 politicians, universities and businesses signing an open letter entitled We are Still In. Auden Schendler, vice president of sustainability at Aspen Skiing Company, said the group isn’t just opposing withdrawal from Paris but were planning to “fight it to the ground”. Elsewhere, Dana Nuccitelli quotes Carbon Brief analysis in a Guardian article explaining how Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris accord could have a positive or negative effect on the global climate, depending on how the rest of the world responds: “If the next American president were to sign back on with Paris and renew US climate policy efforts, Hausfather estimates that the lost time under Trump’s reign would have a negligible impact of just 0.01–0.02°C extra global warming.”

Britain may soon follow Germany in having subsidy-free offshore wind power, Bloomberg reports. Across Europe, offshore wind costs have fallen rapidly in the last year and industry experts say the UK could see equally aggressive bidding this year. The British government soon will collect bids for a funding round for offshore wind projects to be completed in the early 2020s, and bids are likely to show progress toward having the technology work without government support.

Climate Feedback responds to an article by James Delingpole in Breitbart that claims to provide 58 scientific papers published in 2017 that show global warming to be “a myth”. Climate Feedback contacted the authors of all 58 scientific studies to ask them if their work provides evidence against modern climate change caused by human activities. So far, 25 scientists have responded, and all 25 have replied “No”. The Breitbart article “grossly misinterprets open-access scientific papers by simply looking at graphs and entirely ignoring their meaning as explained by authors in the text,” says one scientist.

While the climate change denial of President Trump is “of the extreme and obvious variety,” if not more damaging is “the daily climate denial that passes mostly unremarked all around us,” writes Andrew Simms in the Guardian. “Pick up almost any magazine and you’ll see page after page of adverts for huge SUVs and luxury cars, all with emissions unashamedly far above what is comfortably technologically possible, and with no mention of climate,” he points out. Changing such an embedded culture requires “calling it out whenever it’s spotted using the simple device of social media,” he suggests. From this weekend, Simms will be collecting and sharing examples through the Twitter account @EverydayDenial using the hashtag #DailyClimateDenial.

Ellen Stofan, former NASA chief scientist, has said Americans are “under siege” from disinformation designed to confuse people about the threat of climate change. Speaking to the Guardian ahead of the Cheltenham Science Festival this week, Stofan said that during the past six months, the US science community has woken up to the threat of fake news and responded by ratcheting up efforts to communicate with the public at the grassroots level as well as in the mainstream press. Elsewhere, The Independent reports comments by economist Jeffrey Sachs, who says Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw the US from the Paris climate agreement is “sociopathic”, “without remorse” and “wilfully inflicting harm on others”.

La Niña events have a strong negative impact on wheat yields across the world, a new study says. Researchers developed a global model to analyse the impact of El Niño-Southern Oscillation on wheat yield anomalies and export prices, based on the main wheat-exporting regions around the world. The results suggest that La Niña exerts, on average, a stronger and negative impact on wheat yields and exports than El Niño, the researchers say.

Rainfall reductions as a result of deforestation in the Amazon could reduce the resilience on the remaining forest and potentially lead to large-scale Amazon forest loss, a new study suggests. Deforestation can reduce dry-season rainfall by up to 20% in other parts of the forest, the study finds, particularly over the western Amazon basin and the La Plata basin. The findings suggest that the climatological effects of deforestation can lead to permanent forest loss in the region.

High temperatures and severe drought contributed to extensive tree deaths caused by wildfires and bark beetles during the 2000s in parts of the western continental US, a new study says. Researchers quantified average annual tree mortality from fires, bark beetles, and timber harvest from 2003–2012 for each state in the region. Rising temperatures and greater risk of drought will likely increase these deaths during coming decades in this region, the researchers conclude.