The damage caused by Hurricane Harvey is estimated at between $150 and $180bn, says Texas Governor Greg Abbott, making it a more costly storm than Hurricanes Katrina or Sandy. As the city of Houston and the region’s critical energy infrastructure begins to recover, the debate over how to pay for the disaster is playing out in Washington. US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin yesterday challenged Congress to raise the government’s debt limit in order to free up relief money. “With Harvey, it has moved the situation up earlier and without raising the debt limit I am not comfortable that we will get the money we need this month to Texas to rebuild,” Mnuchin told Fox News, reports that Financial Times. The idea of linking an increase in the debt limit to assistance for the relief effort has sparked controversy within the Republican party, notes the FT. The White House has so far asked Congress for nearly $8bn of initial funding for the relief effort. As Harvey finally fizzles out, the Associated Press looks back at what made the storm so damaging. “When the flood waters recede is when you really have to look at the damage,” Gina McCarthy, former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, said in an interview with Bloomberg. “It’s going to take considerable time.” Harvey displaced more than 1 million people and left wreckage in an area stretching for more than 300 miles, which officials said would take years to repair, says Reuters. An FT “The Big Read” discusses the rebuilding effort that now faces Texas. Because US infrastructure is not built to withstand climate change, the cost of the disaster will be relatively high, says the Guardian. And Hurricane Harvey was the 10th weather-related event so far this year that caused more than $1bn of damage, notes another Guardian piece. US retail petrol prices have hit their highest level for two years, reports the FT, “even though work has already begun to restore operations at several of the refineries affected by the storm”. Meanwhile, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has sharply defended its work in Texas in the aftermath of Harvey, reports The Hill, following a story that the EPA had not completed on-the-ground inspections after the flooding of Houston-area “Superfund” sites that are polluted with hazardous material and require extensive cleanup. The original Associated Press exclusive report “had the audacity to imply that agencies aren’t being responsive to the devastating effects of Hurricane Harvey,” the agency said. “Not only is this inaccurate, but it creates panic and politicises the hard work of first responders who are actually in the effected [sic] areas,” the statement continued. And finally, the Observer asks whether urban sprawl is as much to blame as climate change for the damage caused by Harvey, and the New Scientist looks at which other major cities around the world are most at risk from the sort of flooding that hit Houston. The top five are Guangzhou, Miami, New York, New Orleans and Mumbai.

Global oil demand could peak in only five years, according to forecasts suggesting that oil companies are underestimating the rise of electric vehicles. In a report published today, DNV GL, a Norwegian risk management company that works with both oil and gas and renewables companies, predicts that the peak could come as early as 2022. Remi Eriksen, its chief executive, says they expect “a more rapid uptake of electrical vehicles – personal cars but also into trucks and buses – from 2020 onwards”. The oil decline will initially be very gradual, the report suggests, and the “point where we see oil noticeably start to decline is only at the end of the 2020s”. Combined with the continued decline in coal, the peak in oil demand will see natural gas emerge as the world’s most important source of energy by the mid 2030s, reports the Telegraph. Eriksen said a boom in renewable energy will meet around half the world’s needs – but gas will be the largest single source of energy for decades to come. Elsewhere, the Guardian reports on analysis by Schroders that suggests more than £1.2tn in company profits worldwide could be erased by taxes required to meet the Paris climate agreement. In a “stark warning to investors to back more sustainable companies”, the fund management group said total earnings of 12,500 global companies could fall by 20% were the world to use a carbon tax to achieve a 2C temperature rise limit.

On Friday, California Governor Jerry Brown declared a state of emergency because of a wildfire burning in the northern part of the state. The so-called “Ponderosa Fire” has burned 1,500 hectares and destroyed 30 homes in Butte County, prompting authorities to issue evacuation orders to residents of 500 homes in the area. Meanwhile, another wildfire broke out on Friday, more than 400 miles south of the Ponderosa blaze, in a north Los Angeles neighbourhood. The “La Tuna Fire” has burned around 2,400-hectares and turned into the largest wildfire in LA’s history. A smattering of rain and easing temperatures helped more than 1,000 firefighters gain the upper hand on the blaze yesterday, says another Reuters piece, but officials warned that danger remains. From San Francisco to Los Angeles, California was bracing itself for potentially record-breaking temperatures this weekend, says Think Progress, which are helping the fuel the wildfires.

UK Government minsters are shortly expected to restart plans for a £50bn hydrogen overhaul of the country’s gas grid, the Telegraph reports. Within weeks, the Government will publish a strategy – already more than a year late – about converting the grid to run on hydrogen rather than natural gas. This could cut carbon emissions from heating by more than 70% at the lowest possible cost, the Telegraph says, but “it would still require £50bn and add £170 to gas bills every year by 2050”.

The most devastating floods to hit South Asia in a decade have killed more than 1,400 people and focused attention on the poor planning and lack of preparedness for annual monsoon rains, reports Reuters. “The floods this year have exposed the urgency for [South Asian] nations to work together to deal with natural disasters,” said P.K. Taneja, head of a South Asian regional body launched this year to boost disaster coordination. Flooding upstream in Nepal, for example, was followed by flooding in India this year and then downstream in Bangladesh, he said, but there was little coordination. “We cannot work in silos to deal with floods… It is the worst of floods in decades.” Meanwhile, a piece in Climate Home reports that “India’s floods expose poor countries’ total vulnerability to climate change”.

“To protect future generations as the climate changes, we also need to stretch to more challenging, longer-term efforts,” write researchers Katharine Mach and Miyuki Hino in the New York Times. The flooding in the US and across South Asia provides scientists with a “chance to understand what is actually happening to the climate and all the ways human behaviour leads to – and can mitigate – future disaster”, they say. “We can take actions today that will make us more prepared, no matter what tomorrow holds,” they write, but “even basic measures require commitment and foresight”. “We are not completely at the whims of the weather,” they conclude: “With available tools and an eye toward the future, we can limit the amount of climate change that occurs, minimise the risks that remain and build a resilient future.” Hino recently wrote a guest article for Carbon Brief about “managed retreat” – strategic relocation of assets and people away from areas at risk from extreme weather and rising sea levels.

“We can’t have an intelligent conversation about Harvey without also discussing climate change,” says op-ed contributor, Nicolas Kristof, in the New York Times. “That’s awkward for a president who has tweeted climate change skepticism more than 100 times…and Scott Pruitt, President Trump’s head of the Environmental Protection Agency, [who] says it’s “misplaced” to talk about Harvey and climate change.” “Frankly, it’s staggering that there’s still so much resistance among elected officials to the idea of human-caused climate change.” “A week and a half ago, Republicans and Democrats traveled to see the solar eclipse and gazed upward at the appointed hour, because they believed scientific predictions about what would unfold,” Kristok notes. “Why can’t we all similarly respect scientists’ predictions about our cooking of our only planet?

Two weeks of flooding in Bangladesh has caused 140 deaths, destroyed crops and forced tends of thousands of people from their homes. “The thousands who move to Dhaka, the capital, and other cities should be considered climate refugees,” writes K. Anis Ahmed, publisher of The Dhaka Tribune and The Bangla Tribune, in the New York Times. Bangladesh has increased its capacity to cope with floods, says Ahmed, but there is a limit to what it “can do by itself”. Its neighbour, India – being both the bigger country and the one upriver – “has to take the lead,” he says, but “India has erected a forbidding barrier of concertina wire along the thousands of miles of border between the two countries.” “If South Asia cannot work together on shared natural resources, it will be ill equipped to cope with the desperate rush of refugees,” Ahmed concludes: “Going forward, climate change will displace millions — and there is no concertina wire strong enough to hold back multitudes desperate to survive.”

The growth of coral reefs could be fundamental to protecting atoll islands from future sea level rise, research suggests. Researchers used statistical modelling to predict how future sea level rise will affect Funafuti Atoll, a ring-shaped island located halfway between Hawaii and Australia in the Pacific Ocean. The researchers found that waves could overtop the island at least once a year by 2030, if no efforts are made to cut greenhouse gas emissions. By 2090, waves are expected to flood the atoll regularly at high tide. However, steady reef growth in response to sea level rise could cut the risk of wave-driven flooding by 72%, the researchers find.