The US Environmental Protection Agency administrator Scott Pruitt signed a notice yesterday which formally proposes to scrap the Obama’s Clean Power Plan, a climate change rule for power plants made in 2015. Pruitt argues that the rule exceeds the agency’s authority under the Clean Air Act. Pruitt declared on Monday that “the war on coal is over”. “The Obama administration pushed the bounds of their authority so far with the CPP that the Supreme Court issued a historic stay of the rule, preventing its devastating effects to be imposed on the American people while the rule is being challenged in court”, he said in a statement yesterday. Environmentalists and Democrats have pledged to fight the rollback, and at least two Democratic state attorneys general have promised to sue the EPA, the Hill reports. Next there begins a “backroom battle between industry officials and those anti-climate conservatives over whether to issue a scaled-back replacement rule”, reports Scientific American. It continues: “The hard-liners don’t want an alternative rule because greenhouse gases would still be regulated. And that could mark an acceptance of the endangerment finding, a mound of scientific evidence that affirms human-caused carbon emissions are at the root of rising temperatures”. Nature and the New York Times also carry the story.

A price cap on energy bills proposed by the UK prime minister last week is unlikely to take effect before winter, the BBC reports. However, in an interim step, a million more vulnerable households will see there electricity and gas bills capped, after Ofgem extended its existing price cap to four million. Theresa May had promised to cap charges for an extra 12 million consumers. “This will provide some short-term relief for vulnerable customers, ahead of government plans for an energy price cap being realised”, Ofgem said in a statement. “Fresh data shows wholesale prices are on the rise and bills remain well below their 2014 peak”, the Telegraph adds, arguing that “a sudden surge in market prices could leave energy suppliers severely squeezed if they are unable to raise prices, which would be particularly threatening for smaller players”. The Guardian and the Financial Times also have the story.

“Fundamental failures” by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) led to it bungling a nuclear clean-up contract that left UK taxpayers with a £122 million bill, according to a “damning” report by the National Audit Office (NAO). The NDA announced in March it was to pay £97.3 million to compensate companies that missed out on a lucrative 14-year contract, after the High Court ruled that it had awarded the work to the wrong applicants. The contract with the companies that erroneously won the work was also cancelled, the Times reports. The NAO estimates that estimates that legal fees and staffing costs have pushed the total bill for the debacle to “upwards of £122 million”. The Financial Times also has the story.

As efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions fall short of targets, large scale negative emissions projects, that suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, will be needed by 2030, said scientists at Chatham House, a British thinktank. “If you’re really concerned about coral reefs, biodiversity [and] food production in very poor regions, we’re going to have to deploy negative emission technology at scale”, said Bill Hare of Climate Analytics. “It’s something you don’t want to talk about very much but it’s an unaccountable truth: we will need geoengineering by the mid-2030s to have a chance at the [1.5C] goal”, Hare continued. But such technologies are “costly, controversial and in the early phase of testing”, the Guardian reports. Efforts to store captured carbon underground are “showing no progress … and even backwards steps in some cases” said Corinne Le Quéré, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. Many experts also fear that focusing on these technologies could reduce the pressure to cut emissions now, the Guardian writes.

In a speech on Monday former US vice-president Hillary Clinton linked the current outbreak of wildfires in California to climate change, the Washington Post reports. “In addition to expressing our sympathy, we need to really come together to try to work to prevent and mitigate, and that starts with acknowledging climate change and the role that it plays in exacerbating such events”, she said. “The key word there is exacerbating. Clinton wasn’t saying the fires were caused by climate change, just that climate change may have made them worse”, the Washington Post responds. And “climate change is expected to make fires like that one happen more often”, it writes.

Climate change is making clownfish infertile, the Daily Mail reports, as warming seas degrade the coral reefs that they live in and stress the fish, thereby lowering the creatures’ sex drive. This has reduced the numbers of their offspring by three quarters, according to a new study in Nature Communications. “While no effects on adult anemone survival were observed, the effects of bleaching on reproduction and population demography were likely even greater than demonstrated here”, said Professor Suzanne Mills, of EPHE PSL Research University, Moorea. The study, which was done off the coast of Moorea Island in French Polynesia, is is one of the first to attribute hormonal stress responses to climate change in the wild. The Daily Express also has the story.

The Trump administration formally proposed yesterday to repeal the Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which was aimed at reducing carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants. The news has instigated a series of editorials in papers across the US. “All this is infuriating on several levels”, says an editorial in the New York Times. The announcement repeats “the same false narrative that congressional Republicans have been peddling for years”, the Times writes, that “environmental regulations are job killers, that restraining greenhouse gas emissions will damage the economy, that the way forward lies in digging more coal”. It ignores “the pleas of corporate leaders who know that economic momentum and new investment lie with cleaner sources of energy”, it “repudiated the rock-solid scientific consensus [on climate change]” and “gave us another reminder that Mr. Trump is hellbent on abdicating the leadership on climate change Mr. Obama worked so hard to achieve”. The Miami Herald writes that the rollback of the plan “represents one of the biggest policy errors of this still-young administration”, and that it “holds out the false promise that the government can save a dying industry [the coal industry]”. “Ironically, the repeal is being announced at a time when the impact of climate change is too powerful to deny — in hurricanes of unprecedented frequency and power, in increasing droughts, in expanded wildfires”, the Herald continues. “Fortunately, the courts have stymied many of the administration’s earlier efforts to undo or ignore regulations it doesn’t like, and we hope they will do so with the Clean Power Plan”, the LA Times notes. The San Francisco Chronicle suggests that the EPA be rechristened as the “Environmental Pollution Agency”, while the Baltimore Sunsuggests that “the war on breathing has begun”. The New York Times has also published an in-depth Q&A about the Clean Power Plan.

Analysis from the Financial Times takes a detailed look at what to expect from the UK government’s new “clean growth” strategy, to be launched this week. Support for offshore wind power and an increasing focus on energy efficiency “will be at the heart” of the plan, while renewed backing for carbon capture and storage is also predicted. “Support for a new generation of nuclear power stations will be reiterated”, but ministers are expected to put a “sharp focus on affordability”. This will “also raise further questions about the viability of the £1.3bn Swansea Bay tidal power project”, the Financial Times writes. “While green energy investors are likely to be reassured by the government’s renewed commitment to the carbon reduction goals enshrined in the Climate Change Act, there may be disappointment at a lack of firm financial commitments”, they conclude.

Clown fish, made famous by the animated film “Finding Nemo”, become more stressed and are less likely to reproduce when the coral reefs they live in become bleached in warming oceans, a new study says. Researchers assessed the stress and reproduction of clown fish before, during, and after their host anemone underwent bleaching in the Great Barrier Reef in 2016. Clown fish couples from bleached areas spawned less frequently and produced fewer viable young, the researchers say, highlighting the potential for multi-generation effects of rising ocean temperatures.

Unabated greenhouse gas emissions could lead to “a truly dramatic change” to the surface hydrology of California’s Sierra Nevada, a new study says. Researchers projected changes in snowmelt and runoff from the mountains by the end of the century under a range of emissions scenarios. Without action to curb emissions, warming could lead to shift to earlier snowmelt by as much as 80 days by 2091-2100, compared to 1991-2000. For an intermediate mitigation scenario, the change is smaller – but still as large as 30 days, the study notes.

A new study estimates the impact of climate change on 12 European tree species, quantifying the changes in projected ranges and threat level by the years 2061-2080 for different climate scenarios. The results suggest that some species – such as oak, beech and ash – could be “winners”, while others – including silver birch, European larch, Scot’s pine and Norwegian spruce – are likely to be “losers”. However, “assuming limited migration, most of the species studied would face significant decrease of suitable habitat area,” the researchers note.