Tony De Brum, former foreign minister of the Marshall Islands, and passionate champion of the rights of small island states, has died aged 72, the BBC reports. The threat of rising seas and a changing climate became the key issues of his time as a Marshall Islands foreign minister, and De Brum was instrumental in securing the “high ambition coalition” of rich and poor countries that was key to securing the Paris climate agreement. “The biggest win from Mr De Brum’s perspective, was that the Paris agreement committed to the goal of keeping global temperature increases close to 1.5C”, the BBC writes. “The very existence of the Paris Climate Agreement owes a lot to Tony De Brum”, Hilda Heine, the president of the Marshall Islands said in a statement. Although the Marshall Islands remains one of the places most vulnerable to climate change because it protrudes just 2m above sea level, De Brum said in 2015 at the time that he was determined to stay and fight, the Guardian writes. “The thought of evacuation is repulsive to us….We think that the more reasonable thing to do is to seek to end this madness, this climate madness, where people think that smaller, vulnerable countries are expendable”, De Brum said. Similarly, in an interview with Carbon Brief in 2015, he argued that: “The polluting states must not see the availability of destinations for displaced people as an excuse to continue their behaviour as usual.” The New York Times has also written an obituary. Climate Home has written a piece compiling tributes to De Brum.

Energy Transfer, the owner of the Dakota Access oil pipeline, has sued environmental groups over their opposition to the project, accusing them of inciting terrorism, fraud, racketeering and other charges. The pipeline operator said that Greenpeace, Earth First and other organisations “manufactured and disseminated materially false and misleading information about Energy Transfer and the Dakota Access Pipeline for the purpose of fraudulently inducing donations, interfering with pipeline construction activities and damaging Energy Transfer’s critical business and financial relationships”. The $3.8bn pipeline began interstate crude oil delivery in May, but a federal appeals court judge later ordered the US Army Corps of Engineers to reconsider its environmental review of the line, putting the future of the structure in doubt. The Hill and Bloomberg also have the story.

Worldwide solar panel capacity is set to overtake nuclear for the first time within the next few months, according to GTM Research. The total capacity of nuclear power is currently about 391.5GW, and the total capacity of photovoltaic cells is expected to hit 390GW by the end of this year, with demand growing at up to 8% per year. Stephen Lacy, writing on GTM’s website, said: “The 81GW expected this year are more than double the amount of solar capacity installed in 2014. And it’s 32 times more solar deployed a decade ago.” The International Energy Agency says this could rise to 27% of global electricity generation by 2050 – from 1.8% today – under a “high-growth scenario”.

Scientists have created a new type of bacteria covered in tiny semiconductors that can generate a fuel source from sunlight, carbon dioxide and water. In the lab, they proved more efficient than plants at creating energy from the sun. The new approach, presented at the American Chemical Society meeting, essentially aims “to equip bacteria with solar panels”. “We grow them and we introduce a small amount of cadmium, and naturally they produce cadmium sulphide crystals which then agglomerate on the outsides of their bodies”, said Dr Kelsey Sakimoto from Harvard University. These newly boosted bacteria produce acetic acid, a chemical that can then be turned into fuel.

Victoria has taken steps to become the first Australian state to enshrine its renewable electricity targets in law. The state is aiming to cement targets of 25% renewable power by 2020 and 40% by 2025 in June 2016. It plans to do this by holding renewable auctions, the first of which is for 650 MW of worth of new projects. However, the legislation still needs to make it past the upper house. The Guardian also has the story.

“Scrutiny is mounting” on whether oil and gas giant Exxon Mobil broke the law in its communications about climate change. Two social scientists who analysed Exxon Mobil’s documents, and are publishing their analysis in the journal Environmental Research Letters today, have written an op-ed in the New York Times, breaking down their findings that: “Exxon Mobil misled the public about the state of climate science and its implications”. In total, they analysed 187 documents generated by Exxon between 1977 and 2014, using “established social science methods” and found that “Exxon Mobil contributed quietly to climate science and loudly to raising doubts about it”. “We found that, accounting for reasonable doubt given the state of the science at the time of each document, roughly 80% of the company’s academic and internal papers acknowledged that climate change is real and human-caused. But 81% of their climate change advertorials in one way or another expressed doubt.” Inside Climate News has written about Supran and Oreskes’ research.

A feature in Ensia takes an closer look at “what crashing waves mean for clouds and, ultimately, our ability to understand and adapt to our changing climate”. The piece centres on a couple of recent studies which re-evaluate the chemical make-up of aerosols created by sea-spray. This offers “climate modelers a welcome set of physical relationships to incorporate into their work”, Lougheed writes. Otherwise “they could well overestimate how much water is being incorporated in aerosols as well as the ability of those aerosols to form clouds”. “For modelers, it will mean an already dauntingly complex set of calculations will become even more so in order to respect these new physical and chemical insights, but the outcome should be all the more accurate”, Lougheed concludes.

Climate change is causing a decline in the size and “greenness” of the canopy of forests in Hawaii, a new study says. Using annual rainfall maps from 1920 to 2012 and data on forest size and growth collected from aircraft and satellites, the researchers attribute the changes on Hawaii to a “long-term drying trend”. They conclude that rainfall changes are having a critical impact on the structure and function on the forest canopy, which “likely has cascading consequences for numerous ecological processes such as subcanopy light availability, species interactions, carbon storage, and animal habitat.”