The UK government has lost a high court bid to delay publication of its air pollution strategy until after the general election in June, with a deadline for a draft set for 9 may. Some 37 of 43 regions in the UK have been flouting legal levels for nitrogen dioxide (NO2), set by EU law in 1999 and intended to be met by 2010, reports the BBC. With diesel engines a major source of NO2, the draft plan is expected to include support for clean vehicles and a charge on the most polluting vehicles entering urban centres, says BusinessGreen. Separately, BusinessGreen looks at the need for charging capacity to keep pace with an expected surge in electric vehicle sales and the news that Transport for London is spending £18m on upgrading the power grids to charge the first generation of battery-powered black cabs. Elsewhere, DeSmog UK reports that while UK ministers claim they pushed for tighter restrictions on diesel emissions, in fact the opposite appears to be true. Finally, New Scientist notes that ClientEarth, the legal NGO that brought the air pollution challenge to the government, is also threatening to take the UK to court for failing to comply with the 2008 Climate Act.

President Donald Trump is expected to sign an executive order on Friday reversing Obama’s action before he left office to remove most of the Arctic Ocean from the federal drilling program. Interior secretary Ryan Zinke told reporters his department would also reopen the Obama-era five-year drilling plan, which limits lease sales for new drilling to the Gulf of Mexico and waters of Alaska. None of these actions mean new drilling in the Arctic or Atlantic Oceans is imminent, notes the Hill, given that the process could take years and is likely to draw lawsuits. Elsewhere, The Hill also reports on a letter from nearly 800 former employees of the Environmental Protection Agency urging congress to reject “the Trump administration’s climate denial policies” and comments by Senator Bernie Sanders that “there is no area where [Trump] is more wrong than on the issue of climate change.” Sanders is one of several liberal senators proposing ambitious new legislation calling for the U.S. to transition off fossil fuels by 2050, report The Washington Post and The Guardian.

President Donald Trump has complained that the United States is being unfairly treated in the Paris Climate Agreement, suggesting that China, India, Russia and other countries are paying “virtually nothing” to help poorer countries via the Green Climate Fund while the US is forking out “massive amounts of money”. With Trump’s hundredth day in office fast approaching – the date by which he pledged to pull the US out of the Paris Agreement – the president has told Reuters he would announce a decision “in about two weeks”. A group of Republican lawmakers on Thursday urged the president to keep a seat at the table but to weaken the US pledge to cut greenhouse gas emissions such that it “does no harm to our economy.”

The trade body for the UK gas and electricity industry, Energy UK, has warned Theresa May’s “ill-considered” plan to cap bills would create huge uncertainty and put billions of investment in the UK at risk. The group, which represents the big six energy suppliers, has laid out the key principles it says political parties must adopt as part of their general election manifestos, including a commitment to competitive markets and improvements in customer service, reports Energy Live News. Energy UK’s chief executive Lawrence Slade, who Carbon Brief interviewed in 2015, urged ministers to reconsider the “potential unintended consequences” of intervening in the market.

The head of Saudi Arabia’s state oil company has countered projections that oil demand will peak within years, adding his own forecast that consumption will keep to grow “at fairly healthy levels” for decades to come because the transition to renewables will be “long and complex”. Amin Nasser also told a Paris conference he did not recognise the notion of stranded assets. His comments contradict recent opinions from some of the world’s largest oil companies, notes Bloomberg, with the chief financial officer of Royal Dutch Shell saying earlier this week that the high point in consumption could happen in as little as five years. Elsewhere, The Times carries the warning from the International Energy Agency that global oil discoveries fell to a record low last year, raising the risk of shortages in coming years.

Professor Stefan Rahmstorf, of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impacts Research in Germany, is the latest scientist to cancel their subscription to the New York Times in protest at the newspaper’s controversial latest hiring, writes DeSmog. The Times’ defence of their new recruit, who wrote several columns while at the WSJ that run counter to mainstream climate science, has angered scientists by arguing that “millions of people” agree with Stephens’ opinions. In his letter to the Times’ editor, Rahmstorf writes: “The Times has denounced the critics of its decision as “left-leaning”. This is an insult to me and was the final straw to cancel my subscription. There is no left-leaning or right-leaning climate science, just as there is no republican or democrat theory of gravity.” An online petition calling for Stephens’ resignation has gained almost 25,000 signatures in the last seven days, reports DeSmog.

The top official of the Africa Renewable Energy Initiative (AREI) has quit the clean energy initiative over interference by EU and France, reports Climate Home. Youba Sokona, accused French environment minister Ségolène Royal of a deliberate strategy to “railroad” projects favourable to the EU. According to Sokona’s resignation letter, seen by Climate Home, the Europeans “managed to effectively force through” a list of 19 projects worth €4.8 billion ($5.2bn) at a recent board meeting in March, overriding “a string of reservations” expressed by some African members.

The editorial says: “The good news is that air pollution is easier to tackle than other environmental and public health challenges. Unlike climate change, it is relatively localised: city-scale actions to address pollution levels can have a marked effect on their air quality. Much (though by no means all) of the problem comes down to emissions from diesel vehicles and, to a greater extent than in other areas of public health, consumers are highly responsive to financial incentives. The irony is that we know this because many have switched from petrol to diesel as a result of sweeteners introduced back when diesel was thought to be more environmentally friendly due to its lower carbon emissions.”

With major political upheavals underway and the window for keeping global average temperatures below 2C rapidly closing, environmental advocacy perhaps has a more important role now than ever before, says a new Nature Climate Change editorial. It says, “With these various political landslips intruding into climate policy and its implementation at such a critical juncture for climate mitigation efforts, the environment has probably never been more in need of championing even if we need to think carefully about how that is done.” Environmental advocacy and education is needed more than ever, the piece concludes, to keep climate and the environment front and centre in the minds of the public and their politicians.

Rising temperatures will heighten the likelihood of wildfires over the next few decades in Indonesia, even in non-drought years, a new study suggests. When the July-October period is very dry, the sensitivity of fires to temperature is relatively modest, the researchers say. But under normal-to-wet conditions, fire probability increases sharply when July-October is unusually warm. In future, “mild” fire seasons that are currently seen in wet and cool years will become rare events in Indonesia, the study concludes.

A new study shows that regional predictions of seasonal Arctic sea ice extent are possible for up to 11 months ahead. Researchers carried out retrospective forecasts of regional sea ice for 1981–2015 using a coupled atmosphere-ocean-sea ice-land model. Among their results, the researchers show that the initial conditions for sea ice thickness in the model is crucial for accurately forecasting regional summer sea ice extent.