MPs from the Environmental Audit Committee have warned that the UK could, reports the Independent, “be left with gaping holes in environmental laws allowing polluters to go unpunished and depriving wildlife of vital protection after Brexit”. The papers adds that the UK government has still not committed to replacing around a third of all environmental rules governing air, water, chemicals and waste disposal that cannot be copied over into UK law from the EU: “Besides this uncertainly, there is also currently no confirmation of the extent of the proposed watchdog’s powers, whether it will cover climate change or how it will enforce laws.” The New European includes a quote by Labour’s Mary Creagh, who chairs the Environmental Audit Committee: “If we want a world-leading environment, we need a strong, independent environmental watchdog which ministers cannot quietly put to sleep…The government’s draft bill must make the new watchdog accountable to Parliament.”

Wind turbines can act like “super predators” changing ecosystems by pushing out birds of prey from the top of the food chain, a new study suggests. Indian scientists looked at a wind farm in the Unesco World Heritage Site of the Western Ghats, comparing populations of raptors and lizards on a plateaus with and without turbines. They found areas with wind farms had four times fewer buzzards, hawks and kites, but an over-abundance of fan-throated lizards which are normally eaten by the birds. Lead author Prof Maria Thaker tells the Daily Telegraph that wind farms “are akin to adding a top predator to the ecosystem” with “unexpected effects [that] trickle through the ecosystem”. The scientists stress that their research shouldn’t be seen as a reason to stop wind development, says Yale Environment 360, but note that “since the locations of wind farms are mainly determined based on economic rather than environmental considerations… the consequences of wind farms are greatly underestimated”. The Independent and AFP also cover the research, while the MailOnline runs with a headline that says wind farms “kill off 75% of buzzards, hawks and kites that live nearby”. The study does not say the wind farms has killed off the predators, but rather that fewer birds were recorded feeding around the turbines.

The price of uranium has hit its highest level in more than two-and-half years as big producers buy material in the market and China prepares to reaffirm its commitment to build new nuclear plants. Uranium hit $28.75 per pound on Friday, its highest level since March 2016 and a 40% increase since April. The rise has been driven by a string of mine closures, which have forced producers such as Canada’s Cameco to buy in order to fulfil long-term sales contracts. The expected recommitment to nuclear power from the Chinese Communist Party later this month “will provide a further boost to sentiment”, says the FT. Meanwhile, Reuters reports that the the US Supreme Court is currently hearing a challenge to the 30-year moratorium on uranium mining in the state of Virginia. And also reports that Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman yesterday launched a project to build the first nuclear research reactor in the kingdom.

Sales of new cars in the UK are continuing to fall, reports the Times, adding: “Figures might have been worse had there not been a surge in the buying of electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles before a cut in subsidies announced for this month.” New car registrations in October were 3% lower than the same month last year and the year to date has had 160,000 fewer sales than the same period in 2017, the Times adds. Sales of diesel cars have been particularly hard hit, reports the Telegraph, falling 21% in October compared to the same month in 2017. It adds that sales of hybrids, plug-in hybrids and electric vehicles grew by 31% in October but still make up only 7% of the market. The Telegraph says: “The Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) said it predicted that by 2020 registrations of [these ‘alternatively fuelled’ vehicles] will rise by 82.5% from the current level.” Meanwhile BusinessGreen reports that ScottishPower has announced a new partnership offering customers a “one-stop-shop” to buy electric cars, home charging points and a green electricity tariff.

The amount of energy required to “mine” one dollar’s worth of bitcoin is more than twice that required to mine the same value of copper, gold or platinum, a new study suggests. The research, published in Nature Sustainability, finds that mining a bitcoin – which involves “doing pointless arithmetic quintillions of times a second”, says the Guardian – takes about 17 megajoules of energy for a single dollar. This compares with four, five and seven megajoules for copper, gold and platinum. In a separate piece in the Guardian, freelance journalist Laurence Blair investigates the energy demands of a cryptocurrency industry “that has sprung up almost overnight” in Paraguay.

In a column for Axios, climate and energy reporter Amy Harder and science editor Andrew Freedman take a closer look at comments from President Trump on climate change during the “Axios on HBO” interview last week. When presented with the latest US National Climate Assessment, Trump “disputed that report, said he hadn’t seen it and indicated – while doing a wave motion with his hand – that the climate goes up and down”. These comments “are among the most extreme he’s made dismissing a scientific issue nearly all other world leaders take seriously”, Harder and Freedman write. While Trump acknowledged that “I think we’ve contributed, we certainly contribute, I mean, there’s certain pollutants that go up and there’s certain things that happen”, he also said he “could give you reports where people very much dispute that”. The interview was reported widely, including E&E News, Business Insider and the Hill.

With the US mid-term elections held today, several outlets take a look at the votes that could affect climate policy in the US. Benjamin Storrow for E&E News picks out four states of interest – including, for example, Colorado, “where local discontent about oil and gas production in proximity to residential areas has spurred a referendum on the distance between drilling rigs and dwellings”. Robinson Meyer has a similar piece in the Atlantic, focusing on “Ballot Initiative 1631” in Washington state, which is a “vote on whether to adopt a carbon fee, an ambitious policy that aims to combat climate change by charging oil companies and other polluters for the right to emit greenhouse-gas pollution”. Elsewhere, Umair Irfan at Vox looks at the governor races to watch that “really matter for climate change”, and Marianne Lavelle at InsideClimate News asks whether environmentalists should “reward the courage of Republicans who buck party orthodoxy and embrace climate science…Or should they work single-mindedly to flip the House to the Democrats, given the dim prospects for action in any GOP[Republican]-controlled Congress?.” Finally, Mother Jones reporter Rebecca Leber asks “what’s the real deal?” with Republican megadonor Jay Faison “who claimed he wanted climate action”, but – she says – “just look at the candidates he’s supporting this cycle”.

In a piece for the New York Review of Books, veteran environmentalist Bill McKibben responds to the recently published special report on 1.5C of warming from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). “To read it makes you weep not just for our future but for our present,” he begins. “The takeaway messages are simple enough: to keep warming under 1.5C, global CO2 emissions will have to fall by 45% by 2030, and reach net zero by 2050,” McKibben writes. “We should do our best to meet this challenge, the report warns, because allowing the temperature to rise 2C…would cause far more damage than 1.5”. But previous reports from the IPCC have not been heeded, says McKibben, “and that’s the power of the fossil fuel industry”. “Since the last IPCC report, a series of newspaper exposés has made it clear that the big oil companies knew all about climate change even before it became a public issue in the late 1980s, and that, instead of owning up to that knowledge, they sponsored an enormously expensive campaign to obfuscate the science.” “Given the grim science, it’s a fair question whether anything can be done to slow the planet’s rapid warming,” concludes McKibben. While “it’s not an entirely impossible task”, he says, “we’re running out of options, and we’re running out of decades. Over and over we’ve gotten scientific wake-up calls, and over and over we’ve hit the snooze button. If we keep doing that, climate change will no longer be a problem, because calling something a problem implies there’s still a solution”.

Wind farms can effectively act as a new top level in the food chain, a new study says, which can have “complex ecological consequences”. Using a case study location of the Western Ghats in India, the researchers find that “wind farms reduce the abundance and activity of predatory birds”, thus increasing the density of lizards living on the ground below. As a result, the lack of predators and increase in competition changes the “behaviour, physiology and morphology” of the lizards, the study says.

A new study identifies the role of natural variations in climate in the decline in Arctic sea ice extent over recent decades. Using a “fingerprint pattern matching method”, the researchers estimate that natural variability contributes to about 40–50% of the observed decline. The findings also suggest that “global climate models may not actually underestimate sea ice sensitivities in the Arctic”, the authors say, but “have trouble fully replicating an observed linkage between the Arctic and lower latitudes in recent decades”. Carbon Brief covered a similar study last year.