Labour has made a surprise call for an outright ban on fracking, should the party come into power at the next general election. Previously, the party had called for a nationwide moratorium on fracking and criticised the environmental safeguards that they say have been weakened by the Conservative government but yesterday’s announcement marks the party’s strongest-ever stand on the controversial practice, says the Evening Standard. The shadow energy and climate secretary, Barry Gardiner MP, told the party conference yesterday the move puts the UK on the right track to meet the goal set in Paris of zero-emissions in the second half of the century and provides regulatory certainty about the direction of travel for the UK economy long-term. Gardiner writes in the Huffington Post, “It is clear that gas will continue to play a part in the UK’s energy mix in the short to medium term. But developing a fracking industry in the UK will lock the country into an energy infrastructure that is based on fossil fuels long after our country needs to have moved to clean energy to avoid dangerous global climate change.” Gardiner made it clear the party instead favours “clean technologies of the future”, combining energy generated from small scale wind and solar with local storage. The move has been criticised as “madness” by GMB, the union for energy workers, report The Independent, The Financial Times and The Guardian. The group says a ban would leave the UK reliant on ‘henchmen, hangmen and headchoppers’ for gas. ITV News, Reutersand BusinessGreen also have the story. A separate BusinessGreen article runs through the shadow chancellor, John McDonnell’s, vision for an ‘environmentally sustainable’ economy. Also speaking at the party’s conference in Liverpool, McDonnell argued the global trend was shifting in favour of government intervention.

The first ever shipment of shale gas from the US is set to arrive in Britain today as Ineos, the petrochemical giant, prepares to take a delivery of ethane at its Grangemouth plant in Scotland. The 27,500 cubic metres of gas has been extracted from beneath western Pennsylvania in the US and transported via a “virtual pipeline” of eight tankers. The shipment comes just 24 hours after Labour announced it would ban fracking if it came to power, reports The Guardian, though it also notes the gas will be used to manufacture plastics rather than for energy. With production curtailed by raw material shortages, the American ethane will allow Ineos to operate Grangemouth and other UK sites at full capacity, says The Times. The shipment arrives at a time when UK fracking is back in the spotlight, says The Telegraph, with pressure on the Scottish government’s moratorium on fracking that has so far put a halt on Ineos’s plans to explore for domestic shale gas. The Independent’s front page headline quotes Mary Church, head of campaigns at Friends of the Earth Scotland, who said it was “completely unacceptable to attempt to prop up Ineos’s petrochemicals plants on the back of human suffering and environmental destruction across the Atlantic”.

A new study published in the high profile journal, Nature, has used nearly 60 ocean sediment cores to build the most complete reconstruction to date of global sea surface temperatures stretching back 2m years. But while scientists have lauded the temperature reconstruction, they have taken issue with the study’s assertion that global temperature could rise by roughly 5C over the next few thousand years, even if fossil fuel emissions were halted overnight. The piece quotes Gavin Schmidt, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, as saying, “The temperature reconstruction is great, but the claims about sensitivity are just wrong.” The speculation that the planet might be committed to vastly greater warming than previously thought is “being dismissed as deeply flawed by prominent climate scientists”, reports National Geographic, because it fails to separate the effect of subtle variations in Earth’s orbit from carbon dioxide. In a blog post for Real Climate over the weekend, Schmidt explained why the correlation between CO2 and temperature during the ice ages isn’t enough on its own to predict future warming. Similarly, The Sydney Morning Herald quotes Australian National University’s Prof Eelcho Rohling, who says the study’s calculation of past warming “is not wrong, but it doesn’t translate to what is happening in the future.” Gizmodo has more context on the study and its seemingly “bombshell conclusion”, with further quotes from Schmidt. Climate Central and Ars Technica also cover the study.

America doesn’t have the policies in place to meet its pledge to reduce greenhouse gas emissions agreed under the Paris Agreement, according to a new study. The research, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, says the nation could still overshoot its 2025 target by nearly 1bn tonnes of greenhouse gases, even with a suite of emissions-cutting proposals that have yet to be introduced. The lead author of the study, Jeffery Greenblatt from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, said while he wouldn’t disparage the US’s efforts so far, “we need to do more as a nation and globally to reduce emissions. However we splice it, that’s hard to do.” The study has received widespread coverage, mostly in the US, with The Washington Post, TIME, Associated Press andNew Scientist all covering the story.

Mother Jones is among the many publications to note that Donald Trump demonstrably expressed a falsehood in last night’s TV debate with Hillary Clinton when he claimed that he “did not say that” climate change was a hoax made up by the Chinese. The Washington Post published an annotated transcript of the debate. Carbon Brief has been tracking the nominees’ statements on climate and energy throughout the campaign.

Four British power generators, including SSE and Drax, have called on the government to maintain the country’s carbon tax until at least 2025, according to Reuters. In a letter, first reported in The Financial Times on Sunday, the companies say pricing carbon emissions is “central to the UK’s efforts to decarbonise its electricity system” and that weakening the investment case for coal, the price floor had helped deliver significant, cost-effective cuts in carbon pollution The carbon tax is paid by generators for each tonne of CO2 that they produce and, since 2014, has been held at £18 per tonne until 2021. The pressure on chancellor Philip Hammond to set out future of the three-year-old carbon price floor comes as the OECD finds some 90% of CO2 emissions are not priced at a level reflecting even a conservative estimate of their climate costs, report Carbon Pulse and BusinessGreen.

E3G’s Tom Burke argues there are faster, cheaper, cleaner and smarter ways than Hinkley to deliver low-carbon electricity. He says, “Hinkley is a 20th Century solution to a 21st Century problem. Bigger is no longer better…The falling costs of renewables and batteries and our growing capacity to manage big data are now making a similar rapid transition in the way we generate electricity. Large centralised power stations of any kind are a barrier to this transition…May’s decision to go ahead with Hinkley will slow down, and increase the cost of, making this transition in Britain.”

Amid much optimism that the Paris Agreement could soon come into force, “that milestone could almost instantly be undone if the US courts reject President Barack Obama’s clean energy plan,” says an FT editorial. The hearing, starting today, questions “the courts’ view of the scope of Washington’s regulatory powers,” but really at stake is “US leadership on climate change — and the viability of the Paris deal itself,” says the FT. The “objections are unconvincing both on practical and legal grounds,” says the FT, but there is a possible – if unlikely – chance “the court could throw out the plan altogether on constitutional grounds”. “Even if Mr Obama’s plan survives the courts intact, it would be rendered moot were Donald Trump elected in November,” notes the FT.

Even if all currently proposed climate policies are implemented, the US will still need further cuts to greenhouse gases in order to meet its pledges under the Paris Agreement, a new study says. The US Intended Nationally Determined Contribution (INDC) commits it to reducing emissions by 26–28% of 2005 levels by 2025. However, even implementing all emissions policies relating to energy, transport, farming and buildings, there is only a small chance the US will hit the INDC goal, the researchers say. The study looks at several potential policies that could fill this gap.

A new study reconstructs, for the first time, a continuous record of global average temperature going back two million years. Using proxy data from 59 ocean sediment cores from across the world, the author pieced together a sea surface temperature record for the world’s oceans, and then scaled this up for the Earth’s surface using climate models. Previously, the longest continuous global temperature record was 22,000 years long, the author says.