The UK will raise £20bn from taxes and energy bills over two decades to fund carbon capture and storage, the chancellor Jeremy Hunt is expected to announce in his “spring statement” on Wednesday, the Times reports. It adds: “Plans to fund carbon capture and storage projects are expected to be set out in the budget as part of a ‘clean energy reset’ that will also include details of the government’s plans for new nuclear power plants. Ministers are preparing to launch a competition to select the best designs of small nuclear reactors for use in the UK, in a move that could be regarded as a setback for a consortium led by Rolls-Royce that has been lobbying the government to commit to deploying its design.” The Times adds that the government plans to change rules to class nuclear energy as “environmentally sustainable” in a bid to encourage investors. The Daily Telegraph leads its coverage on how the plans could put the Rolls-Royce mini nuclear project at risk. Hunt will this week argue that the plan could create 50,000 high-skilled jobs, Sky News reports. Sky News notes that the latest plans include no new measures to boost wind and solar in the UK, shortly after its climate advisers laid out their key role for meeting electricity demand by 2035. The Daily Express reports Hunt has been urged by Tory MPs to introduce tax breaks for renewables to avoid losing out following the US Inflation Reduction Act. Reuters adds that industry officials are urging Hunt to reform incentives for “oil explorers” to aid the development of renewables. Politico, i newspaper and CityAM also cover the budget announcement.

It comes as the Observer reports that the Labour party is, if elected, “planning to put the UK at the head of a worldwide green industrial revolution, with a massive US-style, public-private investment scheme targeted at the most deprived regions”. In an interview with the Observer, shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves, who will travel to Washington in May to meet senior Democrats, said a Labour government would “follow the model of US president Joe Biden’s hugely ambitious regional recovery plan [the Inflation Reduction Act], using the climate crisis as the catalyst for economic revival”. She tells the newspaper that Labour would create a new national wealth fund with an initial £8bn of state funding, which it is hoped will then attract private investment. The fund “will be given a specific remit to focus on green industrial revival in deprived areas with regional targets to create hundreds of thousands of jobs outside London and the south-east”, the newspaper adds.

Elsewhere, the Press Association reports that prime minister Rishi Sunak and French president Emmanuel Macron have agreed on an “ambitious new energy partnership”, including a deal on civil nuclear cooperation. The Guardian reports that the world’s largest seller of electric cars, China BYD, has ruled out building its first European car factory in the UK because of Brexit. And CityAM reports that lithium has been discovered at a geothermal development site in Cornwall, potentially “paving the way” for future production of the mineral used in green industries.

Bloomberg reports that the Biden administration has “decided to authorise” the large-scale Willow oil project in Alaskan Arctic, which has faced fierce opposition from climate advocates and Indigenous communities. It says that “after weeks of deliberations, senior advisers have signed off on the move”, with the approval set to be released next week by the Interior Department. Politico also has the news, saying it is true, “according to three people at environmental groups who have talked to the White House and Interior Department in recent days about it”. It adds: “But there is no indication yet that Biden himself has signed off on it, and the administration appears to be still trying to decide how big the project would be, these people said.” On Saturday, the Guardian reported that the Biden administration denied that the project has been signed off. The Guardian says: “White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said ‘no final decisions have been made’ on the project and ‘anyone who says there has been a final decision is wrong’.” On Monday, Reuters also reports that the project is set for approval.

Elsewhere, the Guardian reports on a “first-of-its-kind climate charter” in Texas that, if approved by local residents, could stop production at the country’s largest oil field.

State-owned Saudi oil giant Aramco has announced a record profit of $161.1bn (£134bn) for 2022, amid soaring energy prices and calls for more production, BBC News reports. It represents a 46.5% rise for the company, compared with last year, it adds. The Guardian reports that this is the largest annual profit ever recorded by an oil and gas company. The Financial Times reports that the company increased its quarterly payout to shareholders to almost $20bn in light of the record profits. The FT adds the profits “complete a record set of earnings for the world’s biggest oil and gas companies after fossil fuel prices soared following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine”, with Shell recording 2022 earnings of almost $40bn, the highest in its 115-year history, and ExxonMobil making profits of $55.7bn, a record for a western oil company. 

It comes as the FT separately reports that BP chief executive Bernard Looney’s pay more than doubled to £10m last year after the company saw a record $28bn in profits. But the FT also reports that two of the UK’s largest pension schemes, which together oversee £130bn in assets, will “vote against the renewal of top directors at BP and Shell at their annual meetings unless both companies improve their commitments to tackling carbon emissions”. Reuters reports BP’s 2022 annual emissions remained as high as in previous years. In addition, the Daily Telegraph reports that BP has written down the value of one of its refineries by $1.4bn (£1.1bn) as it “blamed a global shift to green energy which has driven a surge in demand for electric cars”.

China Daily quotes Yang Linping, vice-president of the Supreme People’s Court, in an “exclusive” interview on the sidelines of the ongoing annual “two sessions”, a major political gathering in Beijing. She says “courts nationwide will continue to ensure the strictest rule of law in environmental protection and ecological conservation in order to firmly safeguard ecological security in the new era”. She adds that “legal protection for biodiversity and low-carbon growth will also be intensified to help achieve the country’s goals of peaking carbon emissions before 2030 and achieving carbon neutrality before 2060 as more measures are taken to respond to climate change”, the state-run newspaper notes. Climate Home News covers the same story, writing that, in a “significant legal intervention”, the court has issued “new guidelines that say judges should balance development and corporate emission reduction when ruling on lawsuits”.

The online magazine ChinaFile writes that the “lifting of the zero-Covid policy and ongoing concerns about energy security, among other factors, have exacerbated uncertainties about how, exactly, China intends to meet its dual carbon targets”. It carries an interview with Li Shuo, senior global policy advisor at Greenpeace and one of the world’s “leading experts on China’s multilateral climate and environmental governance”. Li says: “I think what message the top leadership both send out of the [two sessions] will be something quite important to watch. And, of course, this political intention will need to be implemented by China’s bureaucratic system. So I assume the vice premier will still play quite an important role in delivering that agenda [of the dual carbon targets]. And then it goes all the way down to the NDRC and the environmental ministry.” He also explains: “I think the coal power approvals are indeed the most important climate concern for China this year and potentially for the foreseeable future. I think it is very important to understand the reasons behind the coal expansion…The politics are important and they are twofold. One is, of course, the interest to expand large-scale infrastructure projects as a way to boost economic growth…And the second thing…to ensure that this peak load demand is absolutely met. There is an interest of China’s energy regulators to actually build more power capacity, just to be able to fulfill the power demand all of those few hours or few days. It is a very inefficient way of dealing with that problem.”

In other news about the two sessions, China Daily writes – quoting Lu Tiezhong, assistant general manager of China National Nuclear Corp – that nuclear power should play a “more prominent role” in achieving the nation’s carbon neutrality goals “by more applications in energy-intensive sectors, while also serving as a fundamental power source in the large-scale development of clean energy”. A separate article by the newspaper says that the two sessions have “exhibited that China is dedicated to promoting green development and global health security”, citing experts, who added that “the GDP target set for 2023 sends a positive signal for high-quality growth”. A third article by China Daily quotes Song Hailiang, a member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference National Committee and chairman of China Energy Engineering Group, saying “to turn China’s vision of carbon neutrality by 2060 into a reality, the country should speed up technological innovations in energy storage and accelerate its clean energy transition”.

Finally, the Los Angeles Times has published a comment piece by Chris Busch, the director of transportation and a senior economist at Energy Innovation, an energy and climate policy research firm in San Francisco. He writes that “to meet climate goals, China needs to phase in electric vehicles much faster”.

In the Guardian, veteran environmental journalist Geoffrey Lean writes on the BBC’s decision not to air the final episode of Sir David Attenborough’s new programme on British wildlife. The episode lays bare the dramatic decline of nature in the UK and explores the reasons behind it, with sources saying it has been axed over fears it could “antagonise right-wing groups”. (The BBC has denied this.) Lean writes: “This is not the first time that the BBC has effectively silenced its greatest presenter who – after years of criticism for downplaying the threats to the world’s environment – has over the past decade become one the most outspoken and influential advocates of action to combat the climate crisis and preserve biodiversity. But it is likely to provoke the most outrage…Britain has been officially revealed to be one of the worst countries in the world for the state of its biodiversity, having lost nearly half of it since the industrial revolution. And the government is doing shamefully little to tackle this.”

Elsewhere, a Sunday Times column by Oliver Shah “predicts” that the UK will eventually push back its target to stop the sale of new petrol cars by 2030. He says: “In a curious mix of statism and libertarianism, ministers issued stark cut-off dates, then largely left it to the market to meet them. It isn’t working: the car industry is drifting offshore; swathes of property will become obsolete; new heating devices probably won’t be ready to replace gas ones; and an absence of baseload generation means renewables won’t completely edge out gas in the electricity system.” In the Daily Telegraph, assistant editor Jeremy Warner has a column titled: “Here’s the truth about Britain’s net-zero target – it’s wholly unrealistic.” The Daily Telegraph also carries an opinion article from a woman who installed a heat pump and found it to be an “expensive ordeal”. And BBC News explores whether Aerogel, an insultant previously used on space rovers, could be a solution to plugging the UK’s draughty homes.

In a new blog post, Dr Hannah Ritchie from the University of Oxford uses charts to illustrate why countries that only contribute a small percentage to total global greenhouse gas emissions have “no excuse” not to act on climate change.

Global warming has “strengthened the concurrence” of temperature extremes in 56% of 946 paired regions over 1901-2020 – particularly in the tropics – according to new research. The authors develop a “statistical framework to test for spatial dependence” and find that climate change “has not yet significantly affected concurrent precipitation extremes”. The paper concludes that under the very high emissions SSP5-8.5 pathway, the concurrence strength, intensity and spatial extent for both temperature and precipitation extremes will be amplified “substantially” – especially over tropical and boreal regions. Meanwhile, the low emissions SSP1-2.6 pathway “can ameliorate the increase in concurrent climate extremes for these high-risk regions”.

New research finds that Bangladesh will sequester an additional 665,000 tonnes of carbon by 2030 – amounting to 4.4% of the country’s 2030 reduction target from all sectors – if it maintains its current mangrove plantation success rate. The authors calculated the carbon stock for the Sundarbans natural mangroves. They find that, since 1966, the 28,000 hectares of established plantations to the east of the Sundarbans have accumulated around 115,000 tonnes of carbon per year through soil and biomass sequestration. They conclude that “higher levels of investment in mangrove plantations and higher plantation establishment success” could drive more than 2m tonnes of carbon sequestration in Bangladesh by 2030.