Climate campaigners in the UK have described the decision by Leeds City Council to approve an expansion of Leeds Bradford Airport as “a backwards step for the climate”, reports the Independent. The online news outlet continues: “Leeds City Council voted in favour of the plans for building a new terminal and allowing more flights following eight hours of fraught deliberations. Objectors to the plans, which included scientists and environmental campaigners, told councillors that further airport expansion would not be compatible with the UK’s climate targets. The decision came on the same day that the French government decided to scrap plans for a fourth terminal at Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport on climate grounds.” BBC News quotes the airport’s chairman Andy Clarke said: “Our scheme will provide significant improvements, benefits to the regional economy and an improved passenger experience.” The article also carries analysis by BBC News environment analyst Roger Harrabin: “It’s not clear how the Leeds airport expansion plans will play out, and how they will fit with national policy. The government’s advisory Climate Change Committee says emissions from aviation must not be allowed to grow, so every expansion in capacity must be compensated by a contraction in passenger numbers elsewhere. Ministers are considering the advice and preparing a new clean aviation strategy later in the year. But their thinking is far from clear.” The Sunday Times says: “The problem is that if all airport expansion plans go ahead, capacity will soar to an estimated 532 million passengers by 2050, more than three times the growth proposed to meet climate pledges.”

In other UK news, the Sunday Times has a news feature on another planning decision that is leaving the UK government in a “green hole” – the proposed new coking coal mine in Cumbria. It hints at a way out: “The solution is perhaps to offer an alternative, and invest in Cumbrian jobs in nuclear, tidal or marine energy.” In other news likely to anger climate campaigners, the Times (not yet online) reports that “taxpayers’ money will continue to fund gas-fired power stations in Nigeria and Mozambique despite a pledge from Boris Johnson to end overseas investments in fossil fuels”. The newspaper adds: “CDC Group, the government’s overseas investment bank, will be exempt from new climate commitments which are supposed to cover UK foreign spending on aid, export finance and trade promotion…The Foreign Office said that the government ‘would end direct support for the fossil fuel energy sector overseas as soon as possible’.” BBC News follows up on a Guardian story from late last week, reporting that “the government may review its road-building policy in England following a legal challenge from environmentalists”. It adds: “Green campaigners argue that the policy does not fit with the UK’s climate change targets. The case is being debated between lawyers for the government and the campaigners. It could lead to a revision of the roads policy which underpins the government’s controversial £27bn highways programme. The BBC has learned that lawyers for transport secretary Grant Shapps have asked in a letter for more time to decide if he is willing to review the roads policy on environmental grounds.” Another BBC News article notes how the National Audit Office has issued a report which says “the UK government is too focused on raising money from green taxes, rather than checking they are actually working”.

The Financial Times says that the UK government is to fund a “new £10m green finance research centre ahead of the UN climate summit to be held in Glasgow this year”. It adds: “The joint initiative with the University of Oxford and other institutions aims to develop granular, publicly available data that could allow financial institutions and investors to identify a company’s most at-risk assets, or spot deforestation in supply chains. The new UK Centre for Greening Finance and Investment is part of the national effort to establish the City of London as a green finance centre, leveraging on Britain’s status as the host country for the UN climate talks.” The Daily Express covers a new report by the right-leaning thinktank, Centre for Policy Studies, which says that “by attracting high-productivity industries such as green technology…the North could become the home for Boris Johnson’s much-trumpeted Green Industrial Revolution”.

Meanwhile, the Times says that “consumers face paying for significantly more back-up power stations than planned next winter after National Grid warned that many plants were expected to renege on multimillion-pound contracts to keep the lights on”. The Financial Times reports that “North Sea wind farms could be connected directly to continental Europe via giant power cables beneath the English Channel under plans to improve the trade of renewable electricity between Britain and the EU”. The Sunday Times has a news feature on why “BP and Shell’s rush to cut emissions is fuelling a boom in wind and solar power”. ITV News reports that the government has claimed that charging an electric car will be “easier” than refuelling a petrol or diesel vehicle. And, finally, the Times reports that “household rubbish could be turned into sustainable jet fuel at the Stanlow refinery in Cheshire under plans that could create 800 jobs”.

Reuters reports that Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov “discussed climate change with US climate envoy John Kerry on Saturday, with the pair agreeing to cooperate further within the Arctic Council”. The newswire adds: “Lavrov told Kerry he welcome the new US administration’s intention to rejoin the Paris Agreement”.

Meanwhile, the Press Association carries details of an interview that Boris Johnson has given to the CBS network in the US in which he said that he and Joe Biden have had some “fantastic conversations” on climate change. Johnson said: “There’s been some important developments in the way the UK- US thinking has been coming together in the last few weeks, and particularly on issues like climate change, on Nato, on Iran, but above all, on the ways that the US and the UK are going to work together to deal with the environmental challenge that faces our planet.” Reuters says that Biden will make sure that “climate change is on the agenda” at this Friday’s virtual meeting of G7 leaders.

In other US news, Politico says “Biden aims to isolate China on coal – but it could blow back on the US”. It continues: “Biden’s plan to halt US funding for overseas fossil fuel projects will turn the global spotlight on China for bankrolling coal projects around the globe. But it could also push poor countries closer to Beijing — and risk ceding the US’s position as a leading financier for developing economies.” Bloomberg looks at why the Biden administration is “reviving” the “the most important number you’ve never heard of – the ‘social cost of carbon’”. (See Carbon Brief’s 2017 explainer.) A separate Bloomberg article says that “Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz and Lord Nicholas Stern [have] published a paper excoriating the US government – and many of their own peers in economics – for methods used to estimate the cost of climate change”. It adds: “The warning from two influential economists that policymakers are understating the looming damage from warming temperatures comes just days before President Joe Biden’s administration is expected to release an interim report on what’s known as the ‘social cost of carbon’”. Finally, the Hill reports that Joe Manchin, the key Democrat Senator from West Virginia who potentially holds a casting vote on Biden’s climate legislation, has “stressed the importance of natural gas production in a new letter to President Biden”. The outlet adds that “Manchin urged the president to consider the importance of fossil fuel as the Biden administration reviews its fossil fuel leasing and permitting practices”.

The European Commission has said, reports Reuters, that the “EU’s mammoth post-pandemic recovery fund, which is intended to exclude projects that worsen climate change or harm the environment, could in some circumstances be used for investment in a fossil fuel – gas”. The newswire continues: “On offer to the bloc’s 27 member countries are €672.5bn ($813bn) in European Union grants and loans…EU states including Germany and Poland plan to use natural gas, which contributes to global warming, as a ‘bridge’ to wean themselves off far dirtier coal – despite growing concerns that associated leaks of methane from gas infrastructure could cancel out any benefits.” The Commission’s new guidelines say that “limited exceptions” can be made for natural gas projects “on a case by case basis”, pointing to countries where the use of gas could curb emissions quickly by replacing coal and oil.

There is continuing coverage of Bill Gates’s new book about climate change, “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster”. Several outlets interview the Microsoft founder and billionaire philanthropist, including the Guardian which highlights his views on the green new deal in the US, proposed by the likes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, which argues for a goal of reaching carbon neutrality in a decade: “Well, it’s a fairytale,” says Gates. “It’s like saying vaccines don’t work – that’s a form of science denialism. Why peddle fantasies to people?” The Guardian has also published an extract of the book which “explains why we need to cut carbon emissions to zero – even if he is an ‘imperfect messenger’”. BBC News has also secured an interview with Gates which headlines its article with Gates’s view that “solving Covid easy compared with climate”. The interview also reveals that Gates spends $7m a year offsetting his use of aviation jet fuel. Bloomberg also has an “wide-ranging conversation” with Gates which asks him to describe what Joe Biden should so first on climate: “Certainly raise the energy R&D budget to, say, $20bn or $30bn a year. You know, ‘energy’ isn’t a very good word here. Is steel energy? Is cement energy? Is cow farting energy?…The second thing is, we can take a lot of the tax credits that have helped bootstrap solar and wind. That industry is addicted to it, but it’s time to move those into less mature technologies like offshore wind and grid storage.” Bloomberg also has a feature on why “Bill Gates shows how hard it can be to divest from fossil fuel”. The Observer carries Bob Ward’s review of Gates’s book, as well as Dr Michael Mann’s new book, “The New Climate War”. Ward writes: “Both Mann and Gates appear optimistic that the world can stop climate change, but they are also under no illusions about the scale of the challenge we face and the many obstacles that lie in our way. They also show just how wrong those people are who think we cannot or should not succeed.”

The UK has “a real shot” at “leading the world in the fight against global warming”, writes Conservative MP and former business secretary Andrea Leadsom for Times Red Box. However, she continues, “I worry that it must not become too little too late”. It takes “time and real impetus to agree major action on the global stage”, says Leadsom, who offers three suggestions in order to “think big” for the COP26 climate summit in November. These include launching “a yearbook to be updated annually where every signatory of the Paris Agreement records in brief their greatest achievements” on tackling climate change; the UK seeking three “eye-catching agreements” on decarbonisation with big global emitters, such as India, China and Brazil; and the UK “developing a global green investment bank”.

Meanwhile, writing in the Independent, Tanya Steele – chief executive at WWF-UK – says that “a priority must be in ensuring climate and nature goals become a core part of how decisions are made on all aspects of policy – and in particular, economic and fiscal policy”. She adds: “WWF is calling for the UK government to adopt a new spending test to make sure public spending aligns with their own net-zero commitments – so that we’re not undermining our efforts with policies that continue to put the climate and our natural world in peril.” The Daily Express continues its “Green Britain Needs You” campaign with a piece by Dale Vince – owner of the electricity company Ecotricity – on the importance of “rewilding”. And BusinessGreen has a piece from Phil MacDonald – COO and lead UK analyst of energy thinktank Ember – on “why gas power projects are a headache for the UK’s COP26 team”.

“The link between oil production and the increasingly deadly change in the planet’s climate is beyond any serious doubt,” says editorial in the Houston Chronicle, adding that it “welcomes” announcements by the world’s largest oil companies on aiming for net-zero emissions. This is an “exciting, scary new frontier” for the oil business, from which there is “no turning back”, the editorial says. The piece notes that Biden’s decisions around climate have “triggered a backlash from Texas lawmakers”, who are “worried that too sudden a shift could mean tens of thousands of jobs for Texas and Houston”. However, it adds that the oil industry “is going to shrink” and that “the growing energy demand from developing nations won’t be enough to fully counteract a global shift away from fossil fuels and toward renewables”. It says that this will result in fewer jobs regardless of US climate policy.

Meanwhile, a long read in the Financial Times says that “steel’s role in the climate crisis is now under much closer scrutiny”, noting the steel and iron sector is the second largest industrial source of CO2 emissions after power generation, and accounts for between 7-9% of global emissions. It adds that to meet global goals on energy and climate, steel emissions must halve by the middle of the century. It also notes that a number of “the world’s biggest steelmakers” have announced net-zero targets and that the most ambitious plans involve using “clean” hydrogen as an alternative energy source.

New research finds that future flooding projections in the new sixth Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6) are similar to those in the older fifth Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5). Spatial patterns of flooding are consistent between CMIP6 and CMIP5, the research says. The paper adds that future global exposure to flooding is “projected to be proportional to the degree of warming”, and that the threat from flooding is expected to increase as the global population rises.

Avoiding forest loss over the US could have reduced global temperatures by 0.00088C over a 100-year period, according to a new study. Using satellite data and the national forest inventory, the research finds that forest loss in the intermountain and Rocky Mountain West region causes net cooling, whilst forest loss east of the Mississippi River and in Pacific Coast states causes net warming. According to the study,  “US forest conversions from 1986 to 2000 cause net cooling for a decade but then transition to a large net warming over a century”. Avoiding forest conversions would have reduced the 100-year average global warming by 0.00088C, and “offset 17% of the 100-year climate warming effect from a single year of US fossil fuel emissions”, the study adds.