France will end sales of petrol and diesel vehicles by 2040 as part of an ambitious plan to meet its targets under the Paris climate accord, Emmanuel Macron’s government has announced. Nicolas Hulot, the country’s new environment minister, said: “We are announcing an end to the sale of petrol and diesel cars by 2040.” Hulot added that the move was a “veritable revolution”. He said it would be a “tough” objective for carmakers, but France’s industry was well equipped to make the switch. “Our [car]makers have enough ideas in the drawer to nurture and bring about this promise…which is also a public health issue.” Hulot insisted that the decision was a question of public health policy and “a way to fight against air pollution”. The Daily Telegraph reports that Hulot also said that France will “also ban any ‘new project to use petrol, gas or coal’, as well as shale oil, by that date”. Hulot is reported as saying: “The carbon neutral objective will force us to make the necessary investments.” The Financial Times says: “The announcement comes as carmakers are already moving to rapidly increase their output in electric and hybrid cars to respond to growing demand and regulatory pressure. Volvo said this week said that from 2019 it will no longer launch new car models powered only by internal combustion engines. Global sales of electric cars were less than 1% of the market last year.” The Times, which carries the story on its frontpage, says “Britain has come under pressure to phase out diesel and petrol cars after the French announced plans yesterday for an all-out ban…Whitehall has set a target for all new cars and vans sold to produce “ultra-low” emissions by 2040, with a pledge to move to zero emissions by 2050.” Reuters is among the many other publications around the world also carrying the news. Meanwhile, the Telegraph carries an op-ed by Ed Wiseman pointing out that “technology moves at such a pace that this kind of rhetoric is virtually meaningless”.

Electric vehicles will make up the majority of new car sales worldwide by 2040 and account for 33% of all the light-duty vehicles on the road, according to new research published by Bloomberg New Energy Finance. The analysis shows that by 2040, EVs will be “displacing 8m barrels of transport fuel per day and adding 5% to global electricity consumption”. Bloomberg has another article looking at this specific point. Colin McKerracher, lead advanced transport analyst at BNEF, says: “We see a momentous inflection point for the global auto industry in the second half of the 2020s. Consumers will find that upfront selling prices for EVs are comparable or lower than those for average ICE vehicles in almost all big markets by 2029.” The report’s findings are carried by, among others, the Timesand InsideClimate News. Meanwhile, the Financial Times has a feature looking at the “environmental costs of satisfying the electric car boom”. The Telegraph has a feature on “how to master the new etiquette of a world of electric cars”.

With the G20 summit starting today in Hamburg, the Independent carries the frontpage news that the UK’s prime minister has been accused of a “dereliction of duty” after revealing that climate change has been excluded from her top priorities at this weekend’s G20 summit. It adds: “Theresa May left it off her list of key objectives despite the issue likely becoming the central task of the meeting of world leaders, following Donald Trump’s decision to quit the Paris Agreement on climate change.” A senior UK Government official revealed the British G20 delegation’s four objectives would not include the issue. The paper says: “Instead, Ms May will focus on cutting off terrorist financing, global migration, modern slavery and ‘making the global economy work for everyone’.” Green party co-leader Caroline Lucas MP told The Independent: “It’s extremely disappointing that the Government isn’t prioritising climate change at this summit. Meanwhile, the Economist has a news feature times for the G20 summit, headlined: “As America quits, Europe tries to lead on climate change. The G20 will test whether the world can implement the Paris emission accords.” The Times reports that Philip May, Theresa May’s husband, and Melania Trump will today receive “a lecture on climate change from a German quantum chemist” as part of the “spouse’s programme” led by Joachim Sauer, Angela Merkel’s “notoriously earnest husband”. They will all tour the German Climate Computing Centre.

South Australia has picked Tesla to install the world’s largest grid-scale battery, which would be paired with a wind farm provided by France’s Neoen, in a major test of the reliability of large-scale renewable energy use. Reuters reports: “South Australia, the fifth-biggest state with a population of 1.7m, has raced ahead of the rest of the country in turning to wind power. Its shutdown of coal-fired plants has led to outages across the eastern part of the nation, driving up energy prices. The drawback to South Australia’s heavy reliance on renewables has been an inability to adequately store that energy, leading to vulnerabilities when the wind doesn’t blow.” The Guardian and Associated Press also carry the story.

California’s governor Jerry Brown has announced he will host world leaders for a summit on climate change in San Francisco “in September”, which the Hill says is in a “direct challenge to President Trump’s move to pull out of the Paris climate accord”. However, the Associated Press is reporting that the “Global Climate Action Summit” will be held in 2018, not this September, as implied by the Hill: “Brown’s climate conference will feature representatives of subnational governments, businesses, investors, musicians and others to highlight action to fight global warming and to ‘spur deeper commitment’ from national governments. A full list of attendees hasn’t been released, and it’s unclear if any foreign presidents or prime ministers plan to attend.”

The UK has been censured by an international committee for its failure to notify the German public of the potential environmental impacts of Hinkley Point C, the new nuclear power station being built in Somerset, south-west England. The says it is “a political embarrassment for the government, the verdict found that the UK had not complied with the Aarhus convention, an international agreement on involving citizens in environmental matters”. The Aarhus committee’s finding followed a complaint by a German Green party politician, who said the UK should now halt work on the project to properly consult with the public in neighbouring countries. The UK government has responded: “The government has cooperated fully with the Aarhus compliance committee investigation and there was extensive public consultation on proposals for Hinkley Point C before development consent was granted”. It added that it was confident Hinkley would have “no significant adverse effect on the environment of any other country”.

“The issue can be overwhelming. The science is complicated. Predictions about the fate of the planet carry endless caveats and asterisks. We get it. So we’ve put together a list of quick answers to often-asked questions about climate change. This should give you a running start on understanding the problem.” The NYT’s Justin Gillis has updated his list of need-to-know answers to some of the tough questions about climate change.

The Guardian has published a long read about how “doubts about the science are being replaced by doubts about the motives of scientists and their political supporters…Once this kind of cynicism takes hold, is there any hope for the truth?” Runciman, a professor of politics at Cambridge University, writes: “The politics of climate change poses a stark dilemma for anyone wanting to push back against the purveyors of post-truth. Should they bide their time and trust that the facts will win out in the end? Or do they use the evidence as weapons in the political fight, in which case they risk confirming the suspicion that they have gone beyond the facts? It is not just climate scientists who find themselves in this bind. Economists making the case against Brexit found that the more they insisted on agreement inside the profession about the dangers, the more it was viewed with suspicion from the outside by people who regarded it as a political con.”

Amid all the news this week about the growing momentum towards electric cars, Howard takes a closer look at the projections: “Does this signal ‘the death knell’ for diesels, the ‘end of the road’ for the combustion engine, and the ‘historic end’ of gas guzzlers? Well, yes and no…How quickly [are we] likely to see mass adoption of electric cars? Will they quickly become the default option? And how long will it take before the majority of cars are electric? Here the signs are promising, although there is still some way to go…Whilst electric is quickly becoming a viable and affordable option for cars and small vans, the same cannot yet be said about larger vans, trucks and buses.”

The Times carries a full-page obituary for the late Stephen Tindale, one of the UK’s most influential environmentalists over the past two decades: “Stephen Tindale was at the centre of one of the biggest controversies in the history of green politics when he ‘came out’ and declared that he was in favour of nuclear power. Coming from a former leader of Greenpeace UK, an organisation renowned for its anti-nuclear activism, his words were seen by some as the ultimate treachery. He was called a stooge of big business, but those who knew him best insisted that this most cerebral of men had made his volte-face after deep thought and was courageous enough to stake his hard-won reputation on it. His statement in 2009 exemplified his independence from the accepted orthodoxy of the green movement.” The Times quotes Michael Jacobs, a former special adviser to Gordon Brown, about his legacy: “The environmental movement is more pragmatic and effective in terms of government and policy than it used to be. That’s because of Stephen.”

Increasing temperatures and number of ice-free days for lakes in the southern Rocky Mountains in the US could “profoundly alter the length of the growing season and potentially change the structure and function of mountain lake ecosystems,” a new study says. Researchers used records of lake surface and air temperature to create statistical models to assess thermal changes in 27 high-elevation mountain lakes in the southern Rockies. Combined with downscaled climate projections, the models predict a 0.25C per decade rise in annual lake surface temperature out to the 2080s, an increase in summer lake temperatures of 0.47C per decade, and an increase in ice-free days of 5.9 days per decade.

Much of California may get wetter as global temperatures rise through this century, a new study suggests. The researchers find that warming sea surface temperatures encourage a southeastward shift of the jet stream, which could help steer more rain-producing mid-latitude cyclones toward the state. This is is similar to what California experiences during an El Niño year. Overall, the study finds that annual rainfall by the end of the century could increase by 14-15% in northern and central California (compared to the last two decades of the 20th century), but decrease by around 3% in southern California.