The Telegraph reports that key nuclear power players have been called in by the UK government for crunch talks on plans to meet the UK’s energy demands with new small reactor technology, amid mounting fears over delays and Whitehall paralysis. It says: “Industry giants including NuScale, Rolls-Royce, Hitachi and Westinghouse have been summoned by ministers in a bid to reignite interest in the project. They have been asked to present their plans in meetings over the next few weeks. Small modular reactors (SMRs) are a fraction of the size and cost of major nuclear power stations such as EDF’s controversial Hinkley Point C project. The government signalled a key role for the technology in efforts to secure the energy supply and meet climate change targets two years ago. An apparent lack of action since then has drawn criticism and raised industry concerns that the project has fallen by the wayside amid the political instability of Brexit and the general election.” Separately, the Financial Times reports that “Britain will not have enough skilled workers to build a new generation of nuclear power stations unless ministers remove the uncertainty hanging over UK energy policy, industry executives and labour leaders have warned”. The article carries this quote from Alistair Smith, nuclear development director at Costain, the UK engineering group: “It’s 20 years since we built a nuclear power station. These people are not just sitting around waiting to start again…We’ve just got Hinkley C started and resources on that project are already starting to look scarce.

A five-strong advisory panel assisting Dieter Helm with a UK government-commissioned review into energy costs will only have time to meet a handful of times because of a tight deadline, reports the FT. The paper says that one member of the panel said participants had little idea of what the structure of these meetings would be, or how they were expected to contribute to the final report. “As I understand it, we are a sort of challenge panel,” the individual said. “Dieter writes the report and we’re invited to say ‘have you thought of this or that?’. But it will be his work at the end of the day, and he will say what he wants to.” The paper also quotes Doug Parr of Greenpeace: “A review by one man backed by an unpaid challenge panel and operating against a rushed timetable seems a way of simply finding out what Dieter Helm thinks…It is unambitious compared to the review we were expecting.” Last week, Carbon Brief published an in-depth article looking at the challengers faced by Helm’s review.

Britain’s “goodbye to fossil-fuel cars” by 2040 could boost the need for dirtier natural gas-powered stations, reports Bloomberg. The UK government’s goal to replace gasoline and diesel cars with those powered by electricity could see the construction of so-called open-cycle gas stations, said Carsten Poppinga, senior vice president of trading and origination at Statkraft AS, the Norwegian utility that operates hydro power plants and wind farms across the UK. “Britain may have no choice but to use the less environmentally friendly option…With little spare generation capacity, the nation is vulnerable to power shortages, particularly on cold, winter days when wind and solar energy may be in short supply,” says Bloomberg. Meanwhile, the Guardian reports that the rise of electric cars will be a pyrrhic victory for the environment if they are powered by fossil fuels instead of renewables, according to Matthew Wright, the new managing director of Dong Energy UK, the world’s biggest offshore windfarm developer.

Scientists have uncovered the largest volcanic region on Earth – two kilometres below the surface of the vast ice sheet that covers west Antarctica. The project, by Edinburgh University researchers, has revealed almost 100 volcanoes – with the highest as tall as the Eiger, which stands at almost 4,000 metres in Switzerland. Geologists say this huge region is likely to dwarf that of east Africa’s volcanic ridge, currently rated the densest concentration of volcanoes in the world. And the activity of this range could have worrying consequences, they have warned. “If one of these volcanoes were to erupt it could further destabilise west Antarctica’s ice sheets,” said glacier expert Robert Bingham, one of the paper’s authors. “Anything that causes the melting of ice – which an eruption certainly would – is likely to speed up the flow of ice into the sea

The valuation of Saudi Aramco, which is planning its initial public offering for next year, could be greatly cut by policies to address the threat of global warming, an environmental campaign group has warned. The FT says Oil Change International has calculated that policies to meet the Paris climate agreement’s commitment to limit global warming to “well below” 2C could reduce the value of Saudi Arabia’s state energy group by about 40%. “New York and London have been competing hard to get the Aramco listing, but I don’t think they have been paying enough attention to how much it would increase oil price risk and climate risk for investors,” says Greg Muttitt of Oil Change.

Al Gore’s visit to the UK concluded this weekend following the release on Friday of his new documentary, The Inconvenient Sequel. The Guardian reported that Gore believes that Donald Trump has failed to knock the Paris climate agreement off course, despite his efforts to derail it. “I was very concerned at [Trump’s Paris Agreement] speech – I feared that some other countries would use it as an excuse [to delay or withdraw from the Paris agreement]. I was extremely gratified that the rest of the world redoubled their commitment to Paris.” Roger Harrabin, the BBC’s environment analyst, reviews the film: “[Gore] suggested the US would meet its climate targets even without a national commitment. Some agree with this – others think it’s wishful thinking. But if it is true, it does call into question whether America’s targets were too low in the first place!” Meanwhile, Climate Home runs a piece by its editor Karl Mathiesen arguing that last week, following a series of leaks and diplomatic communiques, it could be argued that Trump has laid “the groundwork for staying in Paris Agreement”.

People living in the shadow of the UK’s only test site for offshore wind turbines are opposing a bid to extend its licence amid claims that the facility is to blame for their ill-health, reports the Sunday Times: “The National Offshore Wind Turbine Test Facility at Hunterston, North Ayrshire, is run by SSE, the energy company. Its licence expires in October but SSE wants to extend operations by two years…Locals who oppose the plans claim their lives are blighted by headaches, nausea and insomnia caused by low-frequency noise from two turbines.” The Sunday Times uses the article to run a side story next to it in the print edition claiming that “more than £300m has been paid in compensation for wind turbines to lie idle in Scotland, sparking calls for an end to the green energy ‘subsidy junket’.” The claims are made by John Constable, the director of an anti-renewables campaign group known as the Renewable Energy Foundation, which has long complained about “constraint payments” made to wind farms. Constable is also the “energy editor” of the climate sceptic lobby group, the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), which the Sunday Times does not say in its article. The article is based on a column co-written by GWPF’s Constable and Matt Ridley last week in CapX.

BBC News has reported the views of scientists who have “responded furiously to claims about climate change made in a live BBC radio interview”. It is referring, of course, to the now-notorious interview with Lord Lawson last Thursday, in which Lawson, a climate sceptic Conservative peer, made a number of false claims about climate change. “Experts told BBC News that the assertions made by former Chancellor Nigel Lawson on Radio 4’s Today programme were simply untrue. Lord Lawson had claimed that global temperatures had “slightly declined” over the past 10 years. However, scientists working in the field said the records showed the complete opposite to be the case. BBC Radio 4’s Today programme defended its decision to interview Lord Lawson on Thursday morning in a segment on climate change. The BBC argued that it had a duty to inform listeners about all sides of a debate.” Last week, Carbon Brief published a detailed factcheck highlighting all of Lawson’s errors.

Germany believes the European Commission will propose quotas for electric cars in its next review of measures to cut emissions, a spokesman for the German environment ministry said on Friday. The Commission has said it has no plans to introduce quotas for electric cars for an automobile sector. A spokeswoman for the German environment ministry, which is run by the Social Democrats (SPD) – the junior partner in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s ruling coalition – said without quotas for electric cars the European Union could miss its carbon dioxide emissions targets. The SPD, Merkel’s main rival in September’s election, wants a European-wide quota to accelerate the shift towards electric cars.

The Economist joins the current discussion about the dawn of the EV age: “The internal combustion engine has had a good run—and could still dominate shipping and aviation for decades to come. But on land electric motors will soon offer freedom and convenience more cheaply and cleanly. As the switch to electric cars reverses the trend in the rich world towards falling electricity consumption, policymakers will need to help, by ensuring that there is enough generating capacity—in spite of many countries’ broken system of regulation. They may need to be the midwives to new rules and standards for public recharging stations, and the recycling of batteries, rare-earth motors and other components in ‘urban mines’. And they will have to cope with the turmoil as old factory jobs disappear. Driverless electric cars in the 21st century are likely to improve the world in profound and unexpected ways, just as vehicles powered by internal combustion engines did in the 20th. But it will be a bumpy road. Buckle up.”

The Associated Press news agency has produced a special page of content as one its reporting teams sails through the Arctic Circle’s fabled Northwest Passage to “document the changes global warming has wrought”. It says: “Their dispatches, photos and videos reveal a region of breathtaking beauty where climate change is creating profound challenges.” In one of the features, Seth Borenstein, the veteran climate science AP reporter, speaks to a number of scientists about why “one of the coldest places on Earth is so hot it’s melting”.

Krugman, the Nobel-winning economist, sets his sites on climate sceptics: “The mercenary interests of fossil fuel companies aren’t the whole story here. There’s also ideology…Some conservatives are willing to face this reality and support market-friendly intervention to limit greenhouse gas emissions. But all too many prefer simply to deny the existence of the issue — if facts conflict with their ideology, they deny the facts…Finally, there are a few public intellectuals — less important than the plutocrats and ideologues, but if you ask me even more shameful — who adopt a pose of climate skepticism out of sheer ego.”

The fallout from Lord Lawson’s error-strewn interview with the Today programme continues. Marshall writes: “We were supposed to be past this, but apparently, we’re not. The BBC is still giving unwarranted airtime to people who deny the science of climate change. Its defence – that the misleading claims were rebutted the following day by a climate scientist – is hogwash…In summary, the Today programme had an interviewee who pushed a series of falsehoods, and the presenters failed to challenge him. But the following day they had an expert on, who did challenge the falsehoods. This may seem like good fact-checking journalism. But really it is shoddy journalism, because it fails to understand the audience. If you present someone with misinformation, and later debunk it, the person often carries on believing the original misinformation. Their belief may even be reinforced by the rebuttal. Psychologists call this the ‘backfire effect’.” Meanwhile, the Daily Express has run a prominent column in defence of Lawson, which itself contains a number of climate sceptic canards, concluding: “Maybe we should be embracing the positive sides of global warming.”

Tulloch, the chief executive of international insurance at Aviva, hits out at fossil fuel subsidies: “Governments continue to promote the production of oil, gas and coal with subsidies…The G7 have, in fact, already promised to end fossil fuel subsidies by 2025. We should congratulate Canada, for example, for announcing moves to end its own subsidies in its recent budget. Italy, which next chairs the G20, has published a subsidy inventory. These are steps in the right direction. They won’t solve the problem of climate change alone, and more countries need to get involved. But the fact remains that subsidies are ultimately unsustainable.”

Forget the White House, a new coalition of cities, businesses and universities are taking a lead role in fighting climate change, says the former mayor of New York: “Since the Trump administration announced its intent to withdraw from the Paris agreement, more than 2,500 US cities, states, businesses and universities have signed a letter reaffirming their commitment to the agreement’s goals. Bloomberg Philanthropies is helping lead an effort – we call it ‘America’s Pledge’ – to measure the collective potential of all these groups to reduce their carbon emissions. Just as every nation has done, we will create a clear and transparent report to account for these efforts, and show how they help us to fulfill the pledge we made in Paris. These reports will be made available to the UN and the parties to the Paris agreement.” Separately, the Guardian runs a column co-written by the Hulk actor Mark Ruffalo under the headline, “Trump is the past. Clean energy is the future for America and the planet.”

New research investigates future changes in daily temperature and rainfall extremes across the Caribbean and neighbouring regions. Projections suggest an increase in warm days and nights (and a decrease in cool ones) by 2071–2099 under high and low emissions scenarios. The results also suggest that most stations, except some eastern Caribbean areas and the Bahamas, will see an increase in consecutive dry days. There is no consistent change in heavy rainfall projected for the Caribbean, the study finds, with decreases suggested for some northern Caribbean locations and Belize, compared to a mixture of increases and decreases for the eastern Caribbean.

A new study reviews the differences in public support between centralised global target-setting for tackling climate change (as in the Kyoto Protocol) and policies adopted unilaterally and voluntarily by individual countries (as in the Paris Agreement). Recent surveys suggest that when people are presented with cost implications and free-riding problems associated with unilateral climate policy, public support tends to drop to some extent, the paper says, “but still remains quite high”. This suggests that public preferences concerning climate policy tend to be focused “primarily by a range of personal predispositions and cost considerations,” the researchers conclude.